message from Bob Artigiani

(Sorry, there are problems in this server, and the messages of several
people who have changed their addresses are going through only when the
system -mysteriously- decides... last message from Morris, replying to Bob,
was delayed almost one week. This message from Bob has not entered
either... I am trying to solve this as soon as possible. Please, be patient
during a few days more. Sorry about these technical troubles ---Pedro)

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 10:12:05 -0400
From: Bob Artigiani <artigian@novell.nadn.navy.mil>
To: fis@listas.unizar.es, marijuan@posta.unizar.es
Subject: Re: Reply to Morris
Mime-Version: 1.0

Pedro--If this does not go to the list, wil you forward it? Thanks.

Morris--Thanks for the response. If this does not get to the rest of the
mailing list and you can forward it easily, please do.

You have my scheme down properly and you are debating it on solid grounds.
Thank you for taking the time to articulate and think about it.

However, I will stick with the position taken. It seems to me that the
difference in stature you mention reflects biological information. It does
not much address the jacks-of-all-trades issue, save for the noted
inability of males to have children. What I am talking about in terms of
trades is feeding activities, perhaps tool making, food distributing,
raiding, etc. What anthropologists say is that these sorts of jobs are
carried on by all members of bands indiscriminately; they are not
specialized. So I would see these activities as relating to individual
survival. Thus a band is essentially an aggregation of individuals, a sum
of its parts.

I introduce VEMs when there is a reason for them. To me, there is no need
for VEMs--evaluations of the effects of actions on their contexts--when the
band is an aggregation rather than a system. VEMs "emerge" when a whole
greater than the sum of its parts self-organizes--when there is a set of
mutually-interdependent relations upon which all depend. VEMs relate to
constructed reality, but the reality constructed is the society VEMs map.
I am not saying that the natural world itself is socially
constructed--although our shared knowledge of it is. But I am saying that
there is a constructed social reality and that VEMs appear after this new
level of reality emerges.

The important thing for me here is that we have a science able to track the
creation of new levels of reality, which require new languages to describe
them.
I am, otherwise, afraid we need to reduce VEMs to biology, which I oppose
as much as I oppose reducing biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics,
and physics to particles.

If you look at many ancient myths, such as the Adam and Eve story, you can
see a sense of the symmetry-breaking discontinuity associated with the
emergence of VEMs being captured. VERY CRUDELY: The Garden = Nature; the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil = the creation of VEMs; the serpent =
the symbol of agriculture; and Eve = the women who invented agriculture.
The alienation from the Garden = an irreversible because thermodynamic
process--there is more entropy produced by the organization of coercive
cooperation via specialization, agriculture, or whatever.

There shold be a reason for this qualitative change occurring: The complex
System that an organized society is has a map of itself, which is J.N.
Nicholis's definition of complexity, and operating complex systems requires
distributing processing up to a point, at least--VEMs are the symbols which
can be present in the minds pf all and which allow them to anticipate how
different actions will affect the whole.

The important thing here is that VEMs map the MEANING--the system-level
effects--of actions. Thus, VEMs transcend individuals and should only
emerge with the self-organization of a system. VEMs are how social systems
store knowledge of themselves in themselves. External symbolic storage
systems, VEMs are new ways to store information because they record the
reduced uncertainty of a new observer--the integrated social whole.

Now once such a level exists it will both develop its own logic and
co-evolve with the people whose behaviors constitute a society and its
environment. The ability to track how VEMs change over time through
experience is also very important to any complete treatment of history, so
it is valuable on those grounds. But just as importantly, if VEMs and
people co-evolve--and people and other things co-evolve, like plants and
animals--then why should the VEMs not influence the people? It is even
possible, I propose, that the logical implications of a VEM system could
develop behavioral propensities which stress people and from which they
turn away. The Self is an example of this, and there is, again, good
evidence that people in historical time developed a sense of Self, which
was not present from the beginning or from nature. My favorite examples
are Augustine and Cellini.

I need not fall on my sword over the specifics, but I am perplexed about
how we can respect the differences between the natural and human sciences
if we, in fact, do not recognize that there is something present in social
realities that cannot be explained by biology, chemistry, physics.

Bob Artigiani

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Pedro C. Mariju�n. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Wed Oct 14 12:57:05 1998