"There were never in the world two opinions alike,
any more than two hairs or two grains.
Their most universal quality is diversity"Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, 1580, Bk. II, Ch. 37
Traditionally science has been a quantitative endeavour, whereas human life in general often takes a qualitative approach. When we come to animals we find a more situated communal experiential mode is relevant. These three modes can be related to the third-person (objective), the first-person (subjective) and the second-person (intersubjective) modes of thinking. But as we saw in our last essay, the intersubjective mode is more essentially human than the other two, so how can we both do science and deal with qualities from this 'middle-way' position ? When we deal with qualities (in the plural) we are at the more subjective end of human experience, thus as we saw in our one-dimensional paradox essay we cannot assume any necessary overall agreement between any two humans, let alone by humanity as a whole. Given that science is all about agreement as to 'truth', then this qualitative diversity between persons presents a considerable problem in terms of conventional science.
"The new mathematics thus represents a shift from quantity to quality that is characteristic of systems thinking in general. Whereas conventional mathematics deals with quantities and formulas, dynamical systems theory deals with quality and pattern."
Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, 1997, Ch. 6, Pg. 134
Since qualities naturally form an essential part of complexity science (talk about point, cyclic and strange attractors are qualitative ideas) it seems we are already some way along the path to qualitative living in a scientific sense and may be able to merge this perspective with more quantitative science, as well as dealing with the more individualistic qualitative diversities. But we need to go much further, living is a form of evaluation so we must consider human (and other) values in any qualitative perspective. In considering such a metascience we find that concepts cannot be given hard borders, they are essentially fuzzy in logical form, so our forms of thinking need to move from disjoint 'objects' to labelled 'processes' which are able to transform to other processes and thus change their labels. We should ask "what is a system's 'form' when the system is continually morphing ?". Qualitative thinking (and the associated living and scientific behaviours) is a study of the dynamics of such changes in emphasis.
"That which makes a thing what it is: nature: character: kind: property: attribute: social status: high social status: persons of the upper class collectively: grade of goodness: excellence: profession: manner: skill: timbre"
Quality, Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, 1975
There are three aspects indicated here for 'quality'. Firstly there is the recognition that the 'thing' (for us a person) has various attributes or values by which it can be identified or classified, these relate to what we called the human metavalues which we divided into three levels, the primal (based upon survival), the social (based upon community) and the abstract (based upon immaterial ideas). Secondly we have the connotation of 'better', the idea that a 'quality' item is superior in some way to a non-quality item, which we can relate to fitness or utility. Thirdly we have the implication that a quality item is 'richer' in timbre, i.e. has more overtones or 'depth', which we can relate to the number of attributes a system possesses, i.e. its complexity and diversity. Whilst we can, to some extent, quantify such ideas as fitness or number of attributes, these numbers do not in themselves tell us anything about the individual qualities, for example if we take the quality of 'art' then counting the number of the artist's paintings tell us nothing whatever about his or her 'style', in other words we need to seek to understand instead 'qualia', the feel of a 'quality'.
"Qualia are the properties of awareness. In humans, starting with gestation and continuing up until the brain becomes fully functional, qualia develop in a layered structure... One point of departure may be 'attachment', or better, 'familiarity'... As the layers of the onion of qualia get deeper toward the more basic in the evolutionary chain, that which is familiar changes. It varies depending on the character of the 'object' of the 'subject'... Reinforced (repeatedly circulating) perceptions become familiar, rising above the 'noise' of random, unreinforced perceptions. Using this model, the description of qualia can be extended down to the level of the single-celled organism. At this level, biomolecules that are 'food' for the cell are 'familiar' and constitute the cell's qualia."
The Ontogeny of Qualia, Interscience Review, 1996
Staying with the painting theme, the impression that a painting makes upon us is based largely upon pattern and colour and is an overall holistic impression. Whilst we can analyse various aspects of it if we so desire, as soon as we do so then we lose the impact of the whole. The same is true when viewing a landscape or a listening to an orchestra and we can also use the same analogy to say that viewing a human in terms of limited aspects loses what makes us human, our intrinsic value. This relates to how all our different attributes make up our 'whole person', how they relate to each other and change over time, in other words to our overall experience which enables us to refine our sensibilities over long periods. And note that all these aspects do change over time, there is much difference between a child and an adolescent, between a teenager and a mature person, between an adult and a wise elder, even between a 'layman' and an 'expert'. Rather than considering qualities then as 'static' attributes, we need to look towards their 'dynamic' properties, at their formation and evolution, at their ontogeny. But note that despite much confusion in the literature, these qualia are not some special 'secondary qualities' divorced from the physical world, since there are no 'primary qualities' that do not originate in mind processes, all qualities are equivalent and all originate in the same way, developed or 'constructed' over time by experience and then labelled in arbitrary ways. Thus 'red', 'tree', 'love' and 'car' are all human derived regularities of the same form, they only differ as to how we use them to enhance particular values or needs.
"In the end, consciousness begins as a feeling, a special kind of feeling, to be sure, but a feeling nonetheless. I still remember why I began thinking of consciousness as a feeling and it still seems like a sensible reason: consciousness feels like a feeling, and if it feels like a feeling, it may well be a feeling."
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 1999, Ch. 11
If we take consciousness then as a global feeling, it is an holistic mesh of all our other feelings, and each of these relates to something we value, a 'quality' that makes a difference to us, it defines our 'meaning'. Thus quality living is living in a way such that all these feelings combine positively, we satisfy all our various needs, we have a good 'quality of life'. But note that such a quality feeling cannot be put into words, it is essentially a non-verbal state - indeed as it relates to all our needs then an adequate 'quantitative' verbal description may well run to novel length ! Despite the difficulties in describing such an overall state, we can easily recognise its effect on our motivation. We are 'motivated' to improve our level of meaningfulness, in other words the quality of our lives. And we can do this in many ways. Typically we concentrate on single issues, i.e. whatever seems to be the most deficient of our current values. But by doing this we often are blind to the effects of our 'solutions' on all those other values, upon the qualities elsewhere (both in ourselves and others). We need to do better.
The interactions of our needs and concepts form a pattern, a 'map' that shows 'us', and just like any map we can have a variety of scales. A 'large scale' map may show only my own qualities, a medium scale one would show those of a local group and a very small scale one possibly the entire Earth. Whilst we can zoom in from such a view to any locality, we know well that what we then leave out has not 'disappeared' - it is simply hidden from view. What we have in fact is a fractal, each zoom shows more and more detail, there is 'structure' at all scales. In human terms this means that the global pattern of our qualities is also fractal, each quality links to all the others to create the fluctuating dynamic that forms our evolving world. This dynamic forms what is known in complex systems theory as a self-organizing criticality .
"I would like to draw on a metaphor to elaborate this third kind of knowing. Let us for a moment (and in reflexive awareness of the limitations of metaphor), consider that a person's interactions with the environment can be likened to a conversation between two people. We interact with nature in a spatially and temporally defined way much like we do when we talk with another person. Nature may offer an opening comment such as a birdsong. We then react by drawing on our previous experience to recognize it as, say, a varied thrush. In response to the thrush's single-note call, we stop and begin to search the upper limbs of nearby trees for signs of the robin-like bird. But our stopping brings caution to the thrush and soon she is flitting through the tops of the lodgepole pines. A sequential dance between observer and creature then begins that has all of the earmarks of a conversation between two people, only this time it is between a person and nature.
In an interesting sense, then, our interchanges with nature can be conceptualized as a dialogical drama in which the embodied human and the world of nature play off of each other. The essential feature of this dialogue is the bustle and richness of joint engagement between the human and natural worlds. In this 'conversational' space, the two parties involved in the interchange dissolve into the singularity of embodied, reciprocal dialogue."
Tim B Rogers, In Search of a Space Where Nature and Culture Dissolve Into a Unified Whole and Deep Ecology Comes Alive , 2000
This 'third kind' which contrasts with the first-person 'knowing how' and the third-person 'knowing that', is of course our second-person intersubjectivity and that intuitive global feeling of which Damasio speaks. In complexity science terms it relates to the coevolution of system and environment, which happens in an holistic way embracing all the modalities simultaneously, i.e. in this mode of meaning we do not separate out what we 'know how to do', or what we 'know that we know', so in this sense it would be described more by a 'strange attractor' than by the 'point' or 'cyclic' varieties more common in the dualist modes. Intersubjectivity here recognises that nature is as much a 'co-respondant' as any human with whom we speak, and the semiotics of our interchange relate mostly to the non-verbal 'signs' - stimuli and actions that constantly enact in our ongoing dance.
"O time, arrest your flight !
and you, propitious hours, arrest your course !
Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days !"Alphonse de Lamartine, The Lake, 1820, St. 6
In complex systems, oscillating around that SOC or edge-of-chaos, we expect to find many transient attractors. In other words the patterns that we see in any such system, at any one time, can be regarded as the attractors of the system, but these attractors will be expected to change over time as the system evolves - the 'objects' that our static vision often seems to see are not all that they seem.
This is especially apparent within cultural or personal settings where the ideas in vogue (e.g. local fashions or fads) fluctuate in unpredictable ways. These two pictures, each showing 1600 'agents', differ only by some 200 time steps, each colour represents a view (or concern or fashion) held by a agent and others that agree, yet the groupings differ considerably, both spatially and quantitatively, even over such a short timescale, since environmental fluctuations will often alter each agent's priority issue. This phenomenon (which occurs in all self-organizing complex systems, although the timescales vary considerably - air dynamics are fast, mountain dynamics are slow, humans in-between) makes the adoption of static 'quantities' problematical, since by quantifying these systems we must 'freeze' them and then pretend that our 'snapshot' adequately represents the real system. It simply does not, the pattern we see in our snapshot will have changed almost as soon as we document or make any claims about it.
By adopting qualities however we can capture more persistent features of such systems, e.g. the number of cults that exist. For example, we can reasonably say that 5 major historical religious sects exist in our world, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims (depending upon how we approach such issues, we could specify more or less groupings) but we would be unwise to try to claim to quantify just how many 'believers' comprise each sect - and in fact the 'numbers' just do not matter, it only takes a few believers to makes the views of any such grouping (i.e. their 'qualia') known in their actions (for good or for bad), just as we only require a few atoms of iron to manifest the 'properties' of iron (adding additional atoms does not change those properties, so is of small importance). What is important is the dynamics of the 'groupings' (their sets of attributes or 'qualities'), and whether we classify a particular individual as 'in' the group or 'out' of the group is a very fuzzy matter indeed (how much must an individual identify with, say, daily worship to be a 'real' Christian for example ?). Our labels are, as in all such cases, just approximations, a static picture of a moving 'object'. But given that we can identify a set of qualities, for whatever system(s) is of interest, how can we proceed in studying their dynamics ?
"Out of the dusk a shadow,
Then a spark;
Out of the clouds a silence,
Then a lark;
Out of the heart a rapture,
Then a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
Life again."John Banister Tabb (1845-1909), Evolution
When we look at collections of such 'objects', we often categorize our simplifications by the use of statistics, e.g. a pie chart of relative population sizes. But from a dynamical perspective this is relatively meaningless, the 'slices' will continually vary in size over time. Thus qualitatively what we wish to determine is not the static proportions but how these are changing with time, we are trying to evaluate the trajectories of the system in order to see how it is evolving and especially whether it is getting better or worst according to our chosen criteria. Thus we may say that the population of 'Christians' is in decline, whilst the 'Muslim' population is on the increase. This tells us more than saying (for example) that 25% of the world is 'Muslim' and 30% are 'Christian' (if they are). Discussing trajectories is a very history related idea and brings in the whole nature of learning, i.e. how we make 'quality' distinctions in the first place. In many cases we use 'reinforcement learning' whereby we are 'rewarded' if we get a classification or action 'right' and/or 'penalised' if we get it 'wrong'. This happens subconsciously within our neural network and the lessons thus learned may well be unrelated to or even contradict any explicit teaching intention (i.e. external 'instruction' isn't a predictable or efficient teaching mode).
This use of statistics, in the sense of needing multiple trials or instances, ties in with the usage in quantum mechanics, whereby many trials are necessary before we can decide how many different behaviours or 'qualities' our system even possesses. In other words we need to observe many occurrences before the scope of the attractor space becomes clear - and even then we cannot have certainty that a rare (maybe disastrous) mode has not escaped notice due to our limited sampling. These modes are the available options, and our trajectories will take us from one to another (e.g. from wearing 'red' to wearing 'blue'), but which order or sequence will be seen depends upon the sorts of perturbations impinging upon the system. In complex systems there will be many combinations of simultaneous attractors present (these combinations will manifest the 'feel' of the system), all will be perturbed coevolutionarily by all the others, so occasionally new possibilities will emerge, there will be 'novelty' occurring. Such novelty relates to an expanding state or possibility space and changes the entire statistical structure of our problem, for now past history will tell us nothing about the new ideas, our system leaves the static realm and become truly 'dynamic'.
Classifying any groups however using such statistics is always misleading. The variability amongst peoples (both genetically and culturally) is such that every individual is unique in overall terms, so any classification into one box (or even several) loses most real human qualities. Additionally such boxes distort even their own membership, since (as we have seen) we can classify, say in a census, as 'Christian' people who do not attend church, or who disagree with basic tenets of that faith. We must recognise in fact that there is no such thing as a 'normal' in any form of classification. All we can say about the members of such groups as those that we include is that they have a tendency to behave in a way that is closer to the statistical mean of such group behaviours than to the mean of the other 'alternative' groups in our (arbitrarily) chosen classification scheme.
"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859, Ch. 2
This tendency is like a bias, a sort of 'spring' connecting them to the mean position, such that they are unlikely to drift far from it. Yet perturbations, new information, new situations or contrary opinions, can shift that relationship, perhaps causing the spring to 'break' and resulting in a sudden step change in behaviour - a jump to an alternative attractor or belief. But note that this move can be reversible, subsequently a further change in circumstances can swap back to the original attractor - there is little 'predictable' about such human dynamics. Thus it entirely possible that one person, with a contrary opinion to the 'mob' can, in appropriate circumstances, cause an escalating collapse of public opinion, a move to a new wider mindset or paradigm. This instability is called in complexity science 'deterministic chaos' (or the butterfly effect) and is central to the long-term dynamics of complex systems, since we find that there is little relation found between the size of a perturbation and its overall nonlinear effect (i.e. big causes do not necessarily have big effects, nor small causes small effects).
"The observer may be correct or incorrect in assessing peoples� psychology. Just as the observer may accurately perceive or misperceive an optical illusion, so he may perceive or misperceive peoples� psychology. There must be empirical criteria to establish the degree of accuracy/objectivity with which one perceives peoples� psychology, just as there are empirical criteria to determine the degree of illusion in the perception of objects."
Carl Ratner, Subjectivity and Objectivity in Qualitative Methodology, 2002
Since we have dissolved the idea of 'objectivity' in isolation, have we dissolved also the idea of modernist 'truth' ? No, since we have also dissolved the postmodernist idea of 'subjective' relativity. Both these forms of arrogance ignored the common-sense idea that actions always have consequences, so 'bad' ideas have 'bad' consequences and 'good' ideas have 'good' consequences. But these 'judgements' of 'bad' or 'good' cannot be made arbitrarily by either side, they are not absolutes nor are they isolated one-dimensional issues. All actions take place within the context of a complex environment and are instigated by a complex 'human' system (either an individual or a group). Thus the consequences are also complex, and many issues must be taken into account before we pronounce 'judgement' as to the assessment to be made. Our 'empirical criteria' then are 'whole systems' and the effect of any action on all the qualities that these possess. It is certainly insufficient to isolate a single 'subjective' human view and ignore the disasters that view causes to the societies and environment around it, but equally insufficient to isolate a single 'objective' fact and ignore the consequences of actions based upon its contextual isolation upon humans, animals and our global environment.
"After this discussion of the general characteristics of the science of complexity, we focus upon six principles that capture what we believe to describe the essence of this approach to the dynamics of complex processes and their emergent properties.
1. Rich Interconnections - a long term interaction container
2. Iteration - stages of development
3. Emergence - new values in context
4. Holism - a diversity of values
5. Fluctuations - swapping between values
6. Edge of Chaos - balancing multiple values"Peter Reason & Brian Goodwin, Toward a Science of Qualities in Organizations , 1999
Complexity science can help us to understand the consequences resulting from our actions by analysing the relations within the system and the dynamics of positive and negative feedback loops. Within any complex system these circularities cause the system to enter an attractor, a semi-stable balance point at which the resultant of all the various effects are found. But what is crucial for such systems is that each subsequent action perturbs the system anew, and causes a dynamical evolution (a transient) before the system reaches a new steady state. It is during these transients that the good and bad effects of our actions manifest, causing reactions from others (also with good and bad effects). In general terms we can expect bad reactions if our action hurts the quality of life of anyone else (in any of the many value dimensions they inhabit), and good reactions if it improves their QOL in any dimension. Note that these affected dimensions may well be ones we did not even consider whilst contemplating our action - they are 'unforeseen effects', and it would be true to say that such effects predominate in almost all decisions made in today's world (especially from 'those in power'). Note that 'bad' and 'good' are fuzzy judgements, we are not concerned here with quantification, just with the 'sign' of the resultant (positive or negative-sum).
"Everyone's mad except me and thee
and even thee's a bit queer !"Traditional saying
We each have many goals or desires but we live in a social setting whereby we cannot satisfy all of them at any one time. We must therefore prioritise the actions we take. But how do we do this, how do we decide which goals to pursue and which to forego ? We have a tendency to perform the action that seems most likely to get quick results, i.e. will give short term gratification. But this tendency is also counterbalanced by social pressures. Society offers incentives and disincentives to many of our actions. Usually (but often ineffectively in today's world !) criminal activity is disincentivised and socially valuable actions incentivised, i.e. there is a social bias acting to skew our decision process. But we also have an instinctive bias acting to skew it in other directions (e.g. society may wish us to work, but our body wishes us to sleep). Additionally we have our own unique personality, our own unique blend of interests which also demand satisfaction. This three level blend of needs (biological, psychological, social) makes understanding the dynamics of multi-human social groups a 'hard' post-disciplinary problem, far more difficult than studying single-level systems such as telecommunication networks or cellular metabolism. Thus we can say that neither the 'social constructivist' view that all actions are socially derived, nor the 'evolutionary psychology' view that all actions are biologically based are coherent, these both coevolve together, and it is this coevolution (different for each individual, and strongly emotionally based) that creates the middle layer of our 'psychological' personality or 'worldview' (which means that the view that 'psychology' as an academic discipline can alone explain all mind is also incoherent).
What we have then is a 3-level biopsychosocial mesh or web of inter-relating human needs, and each and every person is perturbing that mesh in different ways and at different rates, such that the whole can never settle to a 'steady state' - it is always 'far-from-equilibrium', what we called the 'edge-of-chaos'. Now our perturbations may be both positive (meeting our or other's needs) or negative (obstructing or preventing the success of others). It is clear then that whilst the former is generally good for society, the latter is not and detracts from the whole of which we are a part, but when we look around us it also seems clear that such self-destructive negative behaviours predominate in our world ! Why ? What is it about humans that makes them prefer hurting others to helping them ? Much of the problem seems to lie in an historical worldview that regards others as 'separate' from us, together with an evolutionary science that emphasises 'competitiveness' and encourages a 'me' or 'you' approach to all issues - a behavioural bias that stresses superiority by conquest, deceit and by hate.
"Ethically, we still struggle with the same issues of love/hate/loyalty/betrayal/... which were the subjects of Greek tragedies - without any real progress, but now with enormously powerful tools which magnify our follies. The gap is ever increasing, and at some point, the system becomes unstable, the tools get too powerful for Civilization to use, and fatal chain of events occurs... To the extent that people are worried about this at all, they tend to worry about terrorism and other evil intent. In fact, the situation is much more general, and the outcome is quite possibly unavoidable - picture a group of children in a gasoline depot, with matches - and instructions to please use them carefully !"
Vladi Chaloupka, Janus Revisited: Some thoughts on the deep trouble we are in, 2002
Yet this hate, this competition, is very much a false view of life, a delusional stance that completely neglects the role of synergy in nature, of love in society and of the need for cooperation in both. It neglects the 'feminine' side of humanity, the caring necessary to look after ourselves and our planet and reduces us to little more than predatory animals, intolerant 'male' egos that would rather destroy than share, a childishness that is embarrassing to behold. In many ways this derives from the male tradition of emotionless 'rationality', that emphasis upon soulless intellect that pervades Western philosophy and endows our resultant behaviours with a diminished sense of unity or empathy. When we engage with the world at a deeper, more 'primitive' emotional level we feel much more that we a part of the world, we experience in an intuitive way the unity of the whole and our co-dependent or intersubjective nature.
"Having opened up the suggestion that dynamic quality is experienced differently at the biological, social and intellectual levels, we can now ask if these varieties of dynamic quality share the same bedrock. It seems to me likely that they do, but that the increasing reliance upon experience and learning to facilitate contact with the dynamic quality comes at a cost. Put differently, the dynamic quality experienced at the biological level is 'better' than the dynamic quality experienced at the social level, which is itself 'superior' to the dynamic quality experienced at the individual/intellectual level. The intrusion of knowledge and experience actually diminishes unity and hence comes at a cost in isolation and obsession."
John Beasley, Quality and Intelligence, 1999
What we have done, in developing our 'rational' nature is to take the world apart, we have enabled ourselves to step out of the spatial and temporal 'real' world, the experiential world, so that we can change the very nature of that world. But what we have not done, is to join up the parts again, we have completed only half the evolutionary job. What we must now do is to move back to full experience. We must first join-up humanity, "we the people" are one race, one species, we are not the 'words', the 'labels' that we always use to categorise groups so that we can hate them ! This is the social level of quality and related to moving from systemic valuations backed up by extrinsic power valuations towards genuine intrinsic human valuations. Next we must join humanity back to the world of which we are a part, this is the biological level of quality and relates to bringing in holarchic valuation modes. Once we have done this then our intellectual level of quality will expand again to the 'best' level of which we are capable, or maybe will even exceed that level to soar to a metalevel of enlightened 'cosmic consciousness'.
"Like splintered through a prism's glare
A scattergram in quadrants three
Our thoughts and feelings, senses fleeIt seems that none together dare
In flower whole and growing free
To huddle close for companyWe would not think a blossom fair
Cold reason man two thirds exclude
If petals left the stamen nudeOr if a weed with strength laid bare
Self-centered mindless sense sole ape
In carnal sport proceeds to rapeWhen sentiment the rest forswear
Emotion's dreams all life shadow
Then ardent spurting feelings flowAnd yet entwined I can declare
In person whole where three makes four
Grows Trinity that's at our core"Chris Lucas, Triad, 1992
One of the chief areas where quality and not quantity predominates is in the realm of poetry. Here also we have one of the few human endeavours that embraces ambiguity, where we rejoice in the multiple meanings of words, in their ability to evoke several simultaneous emotions and ideas, in their ability to create an integral connection to all aspects of our world, to experiential wholeness. In the interconnection of our ideas in poems, metaphor is central and allows us to link up ideas across time, across space, across disciplines, allows us to weave a tapestry of intertwined ideas. Metaphor, and its close cousins simile and analogy, bring out the resemblances between the many attributes of two or more disparate ideas, they help reconnect our world, to break down the barriers that we constantly erect to keep 'things' and 'people' apart. They hold together our fragmented world.
This holding together creates a pattern, an oscillating dynamic that leads us to flip between two ideas, bouncing them off each other in ways that often leads to new insights. We get deeper into our reality, deeper into our intuition, for it is here, deep inside, that our true creativity resides. And this creativity involves expanding our worldview, looking to go beyond what we think possible, what our culture thinks possible, what our 'experts' think possible and entering the world of the impossible. Our conscious nature is limited, it can encompass few simultaneous concepts ( 7 +/- 2 as they say), so if we are to bring together all of our world then we must look to the subconscious, to that vast array of neural connections that allows us to link-up everything we know, to integrate all our ideas, to set up a conceptual field of infinite dimensions, to bring into being a new lifeform, a new meme, a living idea. But what is important is looking at how these memes, these 'beliefs', cause us to individually behave or interact, we are not concerned here with their replication or dispersal.
"In our terms, 'being English' is a memetic profile derived from the acquisition of Englishness memes. We therefore have to be careful of the denotation of the terms 'scientist', 'Englishman', 'capitalist' and so on. The scientist-as-organism is a distinctly biological entity, distinct from the cultural entity scientist-as-Englishman, or scientist-as-capitalist, which depend for their specification on the memetic profile of the scientist proper, the scientist-as-professional
Memes, like genes, can only 'code for' a norm of reaction. All cultural as well as biological traits are distributed over a population curve, with the mean and the mode correlating to the memetic selection bias. As Hull observes, no two scientists even with identical theoretical commitments interpret their views exactly the same way, and it is an oft repeated half joke, half complaint, that there are as many views in a research program as there are practitioners, sometimes even more. Neither memes nor genes determine all aspects of the properties of the entities they constitute. What they do determine are the degrees of freedom and they bias and constrain the outcomes of the so-constituted system. In thermodynamic phrasing, they specify the field of states such memetic systems have a propensity to attain."
John S. Wilkins, What's in a Meme ?, 1998, 5
And our ideas do live, they take on lives of their own, they control us, they bully us, we are enslaved by them. Yet words are not quality, they have no inherent meaning, they are just 'labels', and in nouns take on a very static form. We will concentrate our remarks here on individual words, but the same applies to memes conceived as phrases, songs or injunctions (e.g. Lennon's "Give peace a chance"). We have to be especially careful when using metaphors since they link together disparate ideas and if the link is inappropriate (e.g. a destructive 'war' metaphor for non-conflict situations or decisions) this can badly distort understanding and lead to inappropriate or disastrous actions. Keeping a balance between our words and actions needs us to understand that actual experience is always preferable to relying upon predefined labels, however well-grounded in past success they may be thought to be.
In fact, taking metaphors to extremes can all too easily lead to homogenization, whereby all variety and diversity is lost (not to mention legitimate democracy) and our entire world is then reduced to a static monoculture or worst (e.g. where everything, love included, is analogised to a mere 'exchange of goods' and thus can be and is 'commodified', imposing parasitic and divisive 'middle men'). Words leave out experience, they leave out qualities since labelling a person as, say, an 'Arab' divorces them from all their experiences, all their attributes, and even worst, if the labeller does not have similar experiences, it divorces them from even understanding their own 'label' and results in treating the labelled person as if they are not even 'human' (with all the breaches of basic 'human rights' that result). What we need today is to better identify with experientially based words, with globally related words, with diversity enhancing words, with the quality words of poetics rather than the quantitative words of mathematics.
"I used to think that I ended with my skin, that everything within the skin was me and everything outside the skin was not. But now you've read these words, and the concepts they represent are reaching your cortex, so 'the process' that is me now extends as far as you...
What I am, as systems theorists have helped me see, is a 'flow-through'. I am a flow-through of matter, energy, and information, which is transformed in turn by my own experiences and intentions...
It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up - release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love for the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened...
For when you see the world as lover, every being, every phenomenon, can become - if you have a clever, appreciative eye - an expression of that ongoing, erotic impulse. It takes form right now in each one of us and in everyone and everything we encounter - the bus driver, the clerk at the checkout counter, the leaping squirrel."
Joanna Macy, World As Lover; World As Self, 1993, excerpts
We live in the world, we are of the world, we cannot detach ourselves from it. The energy from the sun flows through all of us, creating those vortices that we wrongly label as an isolated 'self'. Yet when we love we give up to some extent that separateness, we join with another to form a higher value unit, a better 'us' than either of us can be separately. This synergic process can be extended indefinitely, and at each stage a better whole can result. Once we encompass the entire Earth, the World becomes our lover and part of our Self - we become 'one'. This does not need 'enlightenment' just 'willingness', an awareness of possibility, of the analogy between how we treat a lover (and why we think that of value) and how we treat everyone else and our planet (and why we do not treat them all the same).
Yet shared experiences between humans are common at a lower level, whether as football crowds or during pop concerts, and can relate also to natural events e.g. unusual storms or eclipses, or can be directed towards a cause such as 'endangered' species. What these events lack however is the horizontal dimension, they are all outer directed - towards a single external event. There is a many to one connection (N:1) manifested rather than the many to many web (N:M) that we desire. Understanding the quality of togetherness needs an appreciation of our common origins, in evolutionary development, in cultural history, in genetic commonality, in shared values, in future aspirations. It needs an empathy and commitment to support everything and everyone on our common planet. Such a commitment to each and every other does require an openness, a tolerance, an honesty, that sadly many find so difficult even to contemplate today - on a planet of 'spin' where trust has been eroded in almost every sphere.
"Trust is not of our making, it is a given. Our life is so constituted that it cannot be lived except as one person lays him or herself open to another person and puts her or himself into that person�s hands either by showing or claiming trust. By our very attitude to one another we help to shape one another�s world. By our attitude to the other person we help to determine the scope and hue of his or her world; we make it large or small, bright or drab, rich or dull, threatening or secure. We help to shape this other world not by theories and views but by our very attitude toward him or her."
Knud Logstrup, The Ethical Demand, 1997, Pg. 18
One of the problems with generalist labels is that they ignore the particularities of individual behaviour. No class (like 'Arab') is homogenous, there is a wide distribution of qualities about the mean, such that the only valid way of judging any person is by how they individually behave in any particular instance. And here we do not want blind trust (which simply allows easy manipulation) but an openness to events, a potential trust which looks for the good qualities in each person whilst not being blind to the bad. If we show that we are aware of the negative effects of the actions of another upon ourselves and upon our planet, whilst not responding in kind, then we may be able to build bridges. Few people actively wish to be disliked, so if we highlight the qualitative reasons for our dislike then they may be incentivised to change their behaviour, and in today's world it is often the propensity to the frequent lie and blatant denial of obvious truths that seems to cause many of the negative social effects we see around us.
One of the reasons for this is that our reaction to a lie will be to instigate incorrect actions, we will do things expecting a certain result, a certain feedback or reinforcement, yet due to the deceit we will receive the opposite result. This is the same outcome that we get when we make a mistake, so the collective effects of all these lies is that everyone is constantly making avoidable mistakes - it is no wonder then that the state of our world is poor... If we take an attitude of intolerance to lies, yet openness to cooperation, then we may yet be able to reverse those negative trajectories causing the degradation of our world. Whilst individually we can do little to reconnect other people, what we can do is to better relate to our own acquaintances, becoming more aware of their positive qualities and more open to contributing with them towards an, albeit 'local', whole). On what is often called a 'small world' network, where only six degrees of separation link any two of the six billion people on our planet, such local networks can soon become global.
"The rapid growth in coal use in China and India, where pollution controls are minimal, is adding to local and long-distance pollution.
The trend in many countries is toward greater automobile use, often at the expense of non-motorized transport.
Nearly 90 percent of AIDS-related fatalities occur among people of working age, making it the leading cause of death worldwide for people ages 15-49... Largely because of this rising pandemic, death rates have actually reversed their decline in more than 30 countries.
Nearly one in four mammal species is in serious decline, mainly due to human activities.
The number of hungry people around the world increased for the first time since 1970. Starvation now kills more than 5 million children each year.
Fish is the last wild meal in the human diet, but roughly two-thirds of the world's major stocks are now fished at or beyond their capacity, and another 10 percent have been harvested so heavily that populations will take years to recover.
According to the World Bank, less than one-fifth of all countries are currently on target to reduce child and maternal mortality and provide access to water and sanitation, while even fewer are on course to contain HIV, malaria, and other major diseases slated for reduction under the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals"
Vital Signs Facts , Worldwatch Institute, Sep-Dec 2005
Quality can be regarded both as a static attribute and as a dynamic one. Here we emphasise its dynamic importance, and by relating it to human values and their changing positive and negative trajectories we can get a better grasp of how our world is evolving. This evolution isn't a simple concept by any means, since given that we have many people (and animals, and plants, and resources), each with many attributes, then the trajectories of all these will coevolve - there is a very high-dimensionality in state space (thousands of interacting variables). Yet the overall dynamics can be seen clearly and are reported regularly in 'state of the world' reports to our common shame.
Living well means living in connection with all the opportunities around us, in other words it means adopting that coevolutionary 'knowing from' 3rd way of knowing, that extended intersubjectivity which recognises our connection and interdependency with other people and with our planet and implies not living unsustainably at their expense. It means understanding that we should behave in ways to enhance those opportunities, in particular those that will improve our world overall and especially focusing on those that can only be realized by awareness and cooperation with others and with nature. To do this, we must recognise that others (including other lifeforms) have qualities that we lack, qualities that, whilst we could perhaps develop some of them over time, are more easily and immediately enjoyed together. Numbers are static indications, such quantitative living largely ignores the dynamics of any situation, so adopting a qualitative focus, especially concentrating upon whether our qualities are getting better or worst, is a far more appropriate mode of thought and life for today's fast moving world, and to this end the (often unquantifiable) qualitative ideas of the complexity sciences can be of great benefit.