Dear Fisers--
I am sure the world is full of all sorts of things about which I know little or nothing. One is the "sequence"assumption Pedro mentioned in his message last week. I bet mine is not the only education that has been abandoned, and it would be good for Ped
ro to tell us more about it. Similarly, if he or someone would effectively specify a few key notions about processes like protein synthesis, cell-cycle, synapse growth, and apoptosis I would very much benefit. Meanwhile, if Pedro would accept as an exa
mple of a strong thesis the idea that VEMs are informational guides to social roles, which constitute societies upon which there is a selection process taking place, then we would be on at least one page together. This does, in my opinion, help resolve
the old question about why the fit survive and the survivors are fit*some VEMs encourage behaviors with greater adaptive potential than others.
To carry out the tutorial needed to really develop the strong thesis through the fis discussion is probably asking too much. But unless we can actually work through some fairly concrete and specific case showing detailed correspondences, we will not get
very much farther with this project. If anyone has an idea about how to do it there must be several of us ready to listen. Is there some sort of NSF or NATO or European Community funding base that could sponsor, say, 2-3 separate week-long seminars in w
hich we educated one another and reached a consensus?
Meanwhile, I think the "fluid" image is a very good one, but must admit Pedro lost me when he suggests (partially) reconsidering VEMs. VEMs are the sort of loose or fuzzy controls that allow human systems over time to proceed within an orderly framework
that is not, always, stultifying. I also thought we would agree that social systems change because of a few items, whose occurrence triggers nonlinear fluctuations in the social flow--or dance or whatever. But rather than reducing the influence of VEMs,
when the do emerge, there role would be continuous. There would have to be interacting, mutually amplifying changes in symbols, actions, and environments to produce systemic change--see my diagram. Otherwise we are not talking about anything, and I do
not think that change in anyone of these is likely to be so severe that it will shatter the structures in the *fluid* of the systems. There must be changes in more than one and those changes must be mutually exciting if the !
whole structure is to be destabilized.
When I emphasize Social Roles I am saying behaviors constitute societies, which makes the fluid analogy fairly close. This is another way of saying that there is information present in a social system that cannot be accounted for entirely in terms of the
information constituting the individual human beings living in societies. But I am assuming that there must be some way to store information about the behaviors constituting the society. Rituals and rites, myths and religions, VEMs are media for storin
g information about the whole external to the parts. I think there must be something concrete involved in all this. VEMs by themselves would not DO anything, so far as I can guess. But they can be associated with physiological processes in people that
excite them to do all sorts of things.
Now since the map is not the territory, there will be many to one relationships between the VEMs and the behaviors, which allows for variations to be more numerous in cultures than biology. Hence the relative difference in the speed of evolution in the t
wo domains. At this stage, I do not see however that any general discussion could ignore a generic internal-external event. There must be some sort of environmental feedback, I would think, to account for the power laws operating. But I do not know abo
ut power laws, either.
On the other hand, I am quite confident that social processes are not reversible. Societies can collapse, but there is a vast difference between the collapse of a society and the reversing of time. Even if you would accept the notion that behaviors are
what constitute societies, we must both accept the fact that it is people who behave. So you would have to have Julius Caesar get younger to have Rome reverse. And, in any case, there are nice examples of societies collapsing as their VEMs are performed
in ever more self-destructive ways. In fact, every society worth its VEMs (HA!) has myths or logics that account for its collapse.
Similarly, you will search a long time before you find a historian who agrees books lead to Renaissances. But if you think about late medieval environmental factors combining with deviations in religious institutions, plagues, emerging markets and money-
economies, then you get a sense of what it was like to live in a society whose VEMs guided people into social roles which were self-destructive. Chivalry encouraged knights to display reckless courage against long-bows, etc. In the resulting turbulence,
people "rediscovered" the world and man (Burckhardt) as a device for desperately finding out who they were and what was happening to them. This point gives you simultaneously the despair experienced by people alive in Italy in the 15th century--we Itali
ans are more corrupt than other men, said Machiavelli--and the glorious creativity we see looking back at it. I think being able to make sense of the experience of social transformation is immensely relevant--to us.
This is why an overarching entropy law appeals to me*it is purely scientific, essentially quantitative, and certainly disinterested. But you can relate qualitative changes in humans and their worlds to it*n.b., I did not say derive. If societies are *re
al,* they do work; and if they--societies*not just the people in them do work, and if there is evolution, then there is a direction in time AND IT HAS A MEANING. One way to get the extra work done is by individuating people, empowering them, and respecti
ng their autonomy. Thus all the deaths and wasted lives, all the misfortune and exploitation, at least leads, contingently and by the tangled bank, to societies in which individuals are aware of themselves and free to act on their uniqueness. I like tha
t, intellectually and emotionally, although it places on us the burden of preserving the benefits of their sacrifices..
Now if there is evolution in human history--and you can deny it, I think, but then this whole discussion is irrelevant--there must be some increase in complexity. It will be hard to measure. But indirectly you should be able to perceive it because the V
EMs used at different levels of complexity should vary. The guidance needed to produce social roles appropriate to an agricultural society of 5000 years ago should not be the same as those appropriate to an industrial society of 100 years ago--and they a
re not. Nor will the 19th century VEMs be appropriate to the next century. But if we see the world as a chaos-sance (LOVE IT!) it is because of the interaction of a whole range of factors--inside and outside, symbolic and biological--and not JUST becaus
e of computers.
As you can probably tell by how long it took me to respond to the last flurry of comments as well as by the confusions of my response, keeping up my side of this dialogue is terribly difficult. So I will spare you further reading and bow out for at least
the next while.
Bob Artigiani
!
Received on Wed Nov 25 10:34:19 1998
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