The pattern that connects

Emergent confusion

“We are confused because we are trying to find a structure in what surrounds us by looking at different levels.” Inge-Egor

“In everything you could find the tendency to merge and find a common rhythm.” Franziska-Anna

“The metronome is a metaphor for our society: one big influence can convert minorities to big majority.” Mar-Torge

“The emergence theory is about understanding the whole without focusing on each part, but how can we get it without taking in account the role these parts are playing and how they function?” Thomas-Eléa-Tom

“Sometimes it takes less people to achieve more of communication & interaction that works well.” Emily-Judith

“As well as looking at parts of something doesn’t do justice for the whole, the most obvious solution to a problem often may not be the best one if the system isn’t taken into account.” Nathalie-Melina

“A system is alike a sentence, we can’t get its meaning only by understanding every single word that composes it.” Philippine-Cristiana

“If the system, if we are defined and formed by collectivity, influenced bu our environment, part of the bigger picture, how do we break out of this interwovenness? Is there any exception possible?” Paul-Bella

“We are a part of something greater than what we can be at our scale. we have to understand each part to build something meaningful.” Alice-Inasse

Monday Notes

I was astonished once again by your amazing reflections!

To emerge, we start from setting the right questions, withstanding confusion, interacting toward a common purpose; a purpose that is always on the becoming

“I felt quite overwhelmed by all the Information we were given, and it raised so many questions. I hadn’t had the time to just sit back and try to see what the point was in telling us all these different Information … Do we feel more responsible in a more intimate group, and is 20 People already enough to oversee that we are all human beings worth fighting for? What group size is necessary to oversee the individual tragedy? … What drives the single, maybe first cell to “sacrifice themselves”? … What Metronome is the one that defines the rhythm for the others … Why do human beings tend to help less, when there are more people around?” –nowordsneeded

Living your questions. “You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet” (1903)

“This shows really well to me that sometimes individuals think that they understand a certain idea, but in fact it takes communication and interaction with other people to ,,solve the puzzle”. In our world today I think this is very important.” –somewhereinathens

Communication and interaction matters. Communication of information as a way to reduce entropy. Living systems posses the incredible ability of being able to be open, import information from their environment, usually in the form of energy, and disposing their internal entropy, therefore attaining to a higher level of complexity (self-organization).

“Maybe all of us are gathered on this oval table, in this tiny room in the midst of Athens, harassing an elephant by fiddling and touching around. One person thinks it is about about … Yet another person is convinced that we are taking … into account. So what is the story? I feel like our blogs and conversations just serve to make us realize that it is exactly what it is. … I suggest that we have to stop fondling elephants and start understanding, learning from and talking to each other as a class and as society. Communication and empathy instead of misplaced pride and ignorance.” –acceptallrealities

From communication to empathy. Occupy virtually the other’s position. See the word through their eyes.

“Functionalism … Applying it to the system represented by our Psychology class, from what I understand, each individual doesn’t matter as one element, but the relationships between those elements, the social patterns implied and the kind of things we can bring by interacting with each others does. By studying the software and not the hardware, we can come closer to a better understanding of the system we constitute.” –elerasmus

Relation comes first. The space between matters more.

“My third blog took me some time to write, but here it is! I needed some time to think about the last class. During and after the class I felt confused. I didn’t see any relation between the different theories and was wondering if I even should see a relation or that the class was meant to confuse me. … The feeling I felt was just like the ‘strange attractor’s theory… You can’t predict where the line will be going next, but in the long term it will form an figure which the line will not deviate that much from. The confusion I felt was exactly like this, I had no idea what the relation was between the different subjects and where we were going next. Still, in the end, I saw the bigger picture. The confusion is supposed to happen when you look from a specific level (perspective). You could look at problems or theories in a micro and macro level.” –thedutchstudent

Changing your perspective, will change what is seen as a problem, or as a solution. Bear the silence…

“When we were in group, we were wondering ourself about why should we oppose reductionism and emergence ? I found that reductionism is really important to understand the whole even if each part doesn’t explain the final behavior. Every detail count. However, we can’t only take each part, it’s important to understand the final result, and analyze it.” –erasmusblackout

Why lost in dichotomies? Instead of this or that, why not and… and… and… Like a living Rhizome that includes all multiplicities.

“After the last session, I was very confused. Also the other students of the group had questions marks in their faces: We learned a lot in this session but how is all connected? How are the shipwrecks connected to the blind men and the elephants? What is the relation between the metronomes and the slime molds? Are emergence and reductionism contrary to each other or do they have similarities? To answer the questions it is important to look at the single parts, at the individual topics and stories and then put them together to understand and realize the big picture. … To understand a sentence, you have to understand every single word. But to understand the content, you have to put the words in relation to each other. After that you have to integrate the sentence into the whole conversation. Only then you are able to understand the meaning of the sentence. It is exactly the same in all different areas of our lifes.” –chocolatelover98

What is the pattern that connects the shipwrecks to the blind men with the elephants? And the metronomes to the slime molds? And the emergence to the reductionism. And all these to me and you? And with the universe above us?

“For starting to write my third blogpost I needed some time – the last lesson was in comparison to the previous ones a bit confusing to me. There were a lot of new concepts which I hadn’t heard of before but it was quite hard for me to understand and to see a connection between all of them. The more I thought about the different concepts the more I was able to see one and to understand the messages.” –strawberrykid

Time cannot be violated. Time is an inherent dimension in a process. we literally need time to digest food [for thought]. Living systems have their own dynamics. living systems cannot be programmed; living systems can my catalyzed and facilitated, but as long as are living cannot be programmed.

” ‘The collective system does possess a stunning property not possessed by any of its parts’ made me think that, yes, we are all important and unique, but what we create as a group is much more meaningful than what we can be at our scale. That’s what the elephant example told us too, ‘though each was partly in the right, all were in the wrong’. We can all have a different point of view, that will not be right or wrong, but will stay a point of view and not a reality. The reality is different from one another but that’s our whole realities that creates the common reality. ” — erasmusouth

and though each was partly in the wrong, all were in the right. The whole is wiser than the sum of its parts (when parts feel free and dear to speak their minds, while listen to the others).

“About the weather, DDT, shipwrecks, ducks and slime molds … If the objects listed in the title sound confusing to you, imagine how I must have felt during the last #emergence session. I’m really thankful for getting a glimpse into so many different theories or incidents and having such nice examples to help me understand them, but when I left the class, I felt really “full”. At the end of our session I also noticed myself yawning and coughing more and more as if I had to release some of the stuff that was working inside of me. … And I don’t mind that a lot of the time it leaves me with dozens of questions instead of answers, because I feel that these questions do even more for me.” –sweetashoney

Comfort ourselves and familiarize with uncertainty, ambiguity, and destabilization. Zygmunt Bowman talked about liquid reality as the condition that characterizes today’s world state: crisis, followed by ~~equilibrium~~ another crisis, followed by ~~equilibrium~~ another crisis, followed by ~~equilibrium~~ another crisis… Which can be a daunting condition for humans: we long for periods of stability in our lives to be able to build and prepare for the storms that are part of life.

“During the previous session, many of us felt a bit confused. … The understanding process often follows the same pattern: first I wonder, then I dig a bit into the Science … and eventually I “find” an answer. …What we are doing … is a lab. Therefore, the “answer” of the course is no longer universal and directly given to me, no. It emerges from what I understood from the practice and from the results of the experiment. … can we precisely know what will happen here? … There’s no one way to traverse the rhizome after all… our behavior and therefore our results might seem unpredictable, but they are, due to the existence of centrifugal forces. All roads lead to Rome.” –doyoucopy

A living social lab of becoming toward our strange attractor.

“A system is like a sentence, we can’t get its meaning only by understanding every single words that composes it. … It’s interesting because we can understand that people in general only see the present thing under our nose and no in its entirety. … They worked simultaneously, with the same rhythm. So communication is very important, we need communicate to achieve something like this. … Indeed, there are properties at the whole level that can’t be explained by the behavior of the individual components.” –phiphiii

Emergence prerequisites communication and interaction. But are these enough? In which context? Systems thinking means we first look for the context.

“Where to start ? Everything’s pretty confusing. … I remember that in my first blog, I was just wondering “if something had been different, would that connection and our environment have been different ? Does every detail matter ? ” … like these metronomes, we influence each other by communicating and sharing our knowledge to advance towards the same goals, towards the same tempo. And from that emerges our creation, our evolution, our system. “The emergence of life : life, in this view, is not to be located in its parts, but in the collective emergent properties of the whole they create”. ” —

To emerge we need confusion, a challenge, a purpose. A why before finding the how. Why to emerge? What for? A negotiated purpose, a goal. What is the purpose of an amoeba in a slime mold formation? Maybe a its strange attractor?

“Ok, as per usual I’m late posting this blog. … In my opinion this third class makes us reflect about cooperation. An organism is an intelligent machine where each of its component talks to the others, all of them are important but what is essential is the communication between them. We grow up with the idea that we need to be independent and we must learn to provide for ourselves if we want to survive, every time we fail we feel lost because we should be enough for facing this world: ask for help is a sign of weakness. … ” –columbedda

An organism is an intelligent machine, with the intelligence being an emergent property observed only at the whole system level. But the constituents parts seems to exhibit a kind of intelligence, a kind of knowledge about the whole are creating with their actions. Although the intelligence emerging at the whole-system level cannot be intelligible by the constituents parts. Or can be? Does the individual cells of my body understand language and reasoning? Can a single cell understand this reflection?

“all good things come in trees … the problem we face if we are required to observe and analyze something only in a holistic way. Its nearly impossible. While we can surely describe and label something as holistic and call for a holistic point of view, every try to fully understand it that way is merely impossible. We are linear thinkers. Surely we can understand that the linear connections we draw are influenced by the context they are in and that the connection we draw is merely illusional but to understand the full extent of this influence and illusory charakter, this is a totally different thing. Reflection and understanding in my opinion also means a break down and analysation of the things we encounter. Reduction brings things to a point where our mind is able to understand. And while it may never lead to a full understanding of the system it may bring us closer to that point than just to try and look at it only holistically. Surely the connection is just illusional but if we learn to be aware of its illusionary charakter and keep this in mind it probably understand this the best.” –orangensaftpur

How to research complexity in its complexity? It’s impossible and the best we can do is to explore complexity with simplistic (reductionist) ways, keeping the whole system in mind, and hoping for a good approximation.

“In my mind, this old picture can be seen as an portrayal of our modern day society. If we look at social media and how Facebook, Instagram and twitter work, we can see, that all of us are in some way like a blind man. We only see, whats in front of us. Particularly when we look at how we inform ourselves ourselves about news. Through social media like twitter and facebook, every user is constantly in it’s own filter bubble. In this kind of a filter bubble, the person only gets the information, which are influenced by his preferences, personalized searches and website algorithm. … As a result, we tend to drift in a self created space, where different opinions won’t reach us. Like the blind man, we can only see, what we believe is the „whole“ truth.” –pleasemindthegap

… Please, mind the filter bubble. How to create a coherent group that will serve as a good information filter to navigate in an information abundant society, without resulting in an echo chamber?

What is the pattern that connects the shipwrecks to the blind men with the elephants? And the metronomes to the slime molds? And the emergence to the reductionism? And all of them to me and you and to our living lab of becoming? And all of us with the Anthropocene and the Robotocene? And all these with the universe above us?