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Ontology (nee glossary)

Page history last edited by roy williams 3 years, 9 months ago


Ontology ?

 

This is an 'ontology' in many senses of the term, including:

 

(i) a scaffolding, a toolset for understanding where we are, and what needs to be done.

(ii) a description of the key memes that underlie the way society operates, 

(iii) and ... the relations between them.

(iv) an integrated set of memes that hopefully provides the wherewithal for being, in this crazy world.

(v) and in practical terms, its a 'cut and paste' guide for you to use, to edit out fake/distracting lies and half-truths (e.g replace offshore with hyper-national)

 

Note: If you engage with this ontology section long enough, you shouldn't have to read any more of this wiki (or the draft paper), as you should be able to piece together your own jigsaw/road-map/kaleidoscope from the tools and memes here, to engage with the emerging present. 

 

Hopefully this ontology will provide you with the necessary framework to grasp just where it is we have got to (as a species), where we are heading, and what the realistic alternatives are (if any).  The core issues are:

 

i) our two-tiered complex-adaptive systems

ii) our ability to sensibly manage the affordances (both positive and negative) in the abstractions and commodifications, that we create.  

 

 

Preamble

Why do we need a new ontology?

 

Simply, because we have let the genie of yet another open system out of its lamp, without any idea of what we are doing.  And, more fundamentally, we lack any practical appreciation that once genies get out of their lamps, it's nearly impossible to get them back in again.  Historically, this delusional behaviour has been based on an over-optimistic belief in the magic of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market, of Karl Popper's open society, a very naive view of Fukiyama's hubristic propaganda about the end of history, and the embedded myth of the discourses and practices of 'nice white liberals'  (See here for Stiglitz's analysis of  the threat to democracy). 

 

As a species, we have become so hubristically flattered and inured by our freedom and openness, based on our unique 'consciousness' as 'sentient beings' that we have come to believe in fairy tales, and the myth that eventually everything will end happily ever after.  And this is persistently aided and abetted by various political 'big'/bigged-up men - or women, and/or various religions which monumentalise these myths in soaring architecture and ritual, and elide the 'happily ever after' into a metaphysical, teleological, eternity - of your choice - with or without a generous portion of free virgins for martyrs (the males only, of course).

 

That's some oil-tanker to turn around. I am not optimistic about the prospects, but why not try?

 

We have coped or muddled along with many open systems in the past, but they are now really starting to catch us out, as seriously poisoned chalices.  The myths of the Garden of Eden, the Genie and the Lamp, Pandora's box, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are all variants on the same story, each told a little differently. And none of them are kindergarten stories.  

 

They are all about the double-edged swords of logos, of language, of objectivity, of knowledge, of semiotics and (later) meta-semiotics, of AI and machine learning - i.e. all the 'difference machines that differentiate Homo (and particularly H. Sapiens) from all other species. We are simultaneously the 'cleverest' and the most stupid of them all, for we are the only ones that can, ironically, take control of our own destiny - and therefore the only ones 'capable' enough to commit species suicide - and take most other species with us too, to our eternal demise in the 6th - but by no means final - mass extinction.  

 

Core

Linear v. Complex-adaptive systems

The key, the sine qua non of a new ontology is that we must shake ourselves loose from the myth of predictability and control.  We need to push ourselves back into nature (to paraphrase Latour), which means there are no more 'externalities' - we're in it, with all our garbage, and that has consequences. And the only way to do achieve that is to re-conceptualise our role, our place, and our being, by re-inserting ourselves into emergent ecologies, as just one of the (tiny) players in a universe that is fundamentally beyond our control.   

 

Despite centuries of hubristic 'thinking' i.e. the belief that we live in a linear, predictable universe, it's time to recognise that that linear logic, based on 'physics-envy', however beguiling and 'clever' it might be, is no longer fit for the task ahead - which is to avert our looming self-inflicted extinction.  As Dave Snowden (add link) and Paul Cilliers (add link) point out, before we rush into finding 'solutions', we first need to determine whether the problems we are facing are non-linear and complex-adaptive, or linear and complicated, and then deal with them accordingly.  

 

The dialectic, the parabola, of this 'charmed' life of ours, and our patronising species 'superiority', has now irrevocably turned; it has overshot its apogee.  Sending humans to the Moon / Mars, etc, is no longer relevant, desirable, or acceptable (let alone space tourism). Rather, these projects need to be recognised for what they are - expensive and damaging (for climate breakdown), quite obscene, nationalist vanity projects. They should all be banned for the next 50 if not 100 years, along with the uncritical 'science-will-set-you-free' programmes on national television, and the uncritical campaigns of national(ist) political parties - which insist on celebrating "space travel", and landing men (sic) on the moon and, (not yet), on Mars (but see Trump's latest budget proposals for 2020).    

 


Emergent systems (add link) 

It's all very well to congratulate ourselves on the spectacular achievements of positivist science.  

 

However, we urgently need to recognise that we actually exist in an network of interconnected, two-tiered, complex-emergent, open systems. Tier 1 is the biological world of instinctual behaviour that we emerged from, some 2 million years ago. Tier 2 is what has happened since we were expelled from the Garden of Eden - when we 'ate from the tree of knowledge' (or, fill in your own origins narrative or myth, here ...).  This is where we first abstracted - and alienated - ourselves from biological emergence into social emergence, by developing our own difference machines, our own language/s - our first hypertexts, and where we started to create and control our own destiny (or so we thought). We have become the ultimate solipsistic species, obsessed with resonating with ourselves, abstracted as far as possible from the nature that we are, in fact, only a small, (but now dangerous) part of.

 

The very idea of taking control of emergence is a contradiction in terms - even if we were to become the masters of the universe of our dreams. By all accounts taking control is a myth, as we don't have any idea of what 95% of the universe is even made of.  

 

The central characteristic of our two-tiered complex-adaptive systems (to give them their full name) is emergence,or unpredictable change and innovation, which is nevertheless ordered, and in which no amount of hindsight will yield foresight or predictability

 

Emergence occurs ...

 

when large numbers of agents  interact frequently, with large degrees of freedom, but nevertheless within some definite constraints.  Such systems - if and only if they have appropriate constraints - can be self-correcting, and produce change and innovation, which takes place mostly at the edge of chaos.  Emergence can enhance or disrupt existing ecologies and/or aspects of them. And as we are rather belatedly realising, it can destroy them too, if the 'edge of chaos' is not constantly monitored and managed, or if constraints are removed (most often in the interests of 'freedoms' of one kind or another). 

 

(Add link and graphic).

 

Sleepwalking into extinction

Our current journey within complex-adaptive social semiotics (not 'progress', it's a journey, a practice, and it's NOT linear), towards the double-edged excesses of wealth, science, growth, urbanisation, nation-building, knowledge and communication has been built on a concatenation of stages of abstraction, each of which unlocks another layer of powerful/dangerous open systems, and new affordances for further abstraction from the material and instinctual constraints of earlier life forms and ecologies. The central lesson of the Garden of the Eden story is: "be careful what you wish for ...". 

 

Here are some of the more remarkable milestones in this process of cumulative abstraction/alienation:

 

* Warm-blooded animals

A recent article by Patricia Churchland added a new dimension to the abstractions to follow - i.e. the transition from the hard 'givens' of instinctive animal behaviour in cold-blooded animals, during evolutionary change over millions of years to the evolution-on-steroids of warm-blooded animals.  

 

This step towards the rudiments of our current 24/7 open systems was a big game changer: "Endothermy was a master stroke in biological evolution.  If you are warm-blooded, you can store energy and feed at night, whilst your cold-blooded competitors must wait for the sun to come up ... but (the downside is, you) need 10 times as many calories (... to do that)".  Churchland goes on to set out in detail how this fundamental abstraction from the solar day, along with the essential order of magnitude increase in consumption and resource extraction, led to smartness, vulnerability, motherhood, and empathy (in that order) - to which she might have added 'and increasingly bloody conflict'.  (She hopes that our consequent "sense of morality, rooted in nothing more than our mammalian origins, makes us a little less likely to be infatuated with our own moral superiority"). 

 

* Patterns of patterns

These warm-blooded animals maintained their predecessor's many sophisticated senses and their capability for pattern recognition.  But crucial to the subsequent evolutionary innovations in Homo Sapiens seems to have been the extended development of particular parts of the mammalian brain (notably the Angular Gyrus) which provided affordances for recognising not only cross-modal patterns (which we share with many other animals), but also for the fundamental shift and abstraction to modality-free patterns, which are the foundations for symbolic behaviour and language, as well as all further abstractions. See here ... for more details.

 

Disclaimer: The relationships (let alone borderlines) between animal and human behaviour (or zoo- and socio- semiotics) are far from distinct. They are at the least blurred and interlaced, and form another fascinating field of study, which will not be dealt with here. However, feel free to engage your imagination / browse the literature on these issues if you wish ... 

 

*Language (commodified difference systems)

 Language provides the basis for the first forms of symbolic behaviour, for resonance over and above the purely physical forms of attraction, status, power and order. Symbolic resonance is realised by using the double-articulation (or double-layered abstraction) of the sounds and combinations of sounds that make up all languages, which, as parole, is thus both arbitrary and conventional.

 

This provides the tools and affordances for: 

 

i) Symbolic tools and symbolic resonance communities. These are based, as Barthes said, on the idea that "every use becomes a sign of itself".  Linguistic communities are also based on the fundamental abstraction of interchangeable, referent-free personal pronouns, which are, fleetingly, highly specific, but paradoxically also highly unstable, as they get constantly passed around and swapped between one agent and another, e.g. "I" and "you", etc.

 

ii) Social resonance. As the stock of symbolic memes evolves, language becomes the basis for work/cooperation/coercion/the projection of power, etc, based on the alienation and deferment from immediate satisfaction. This is a direct extension of the necessary abstraction and alienation from the restrictions of daylight life, achieved by the first warm-blooded animals (see above), which was one of the earliest building blocks of what has ended up/degraded into our current 24/7 hyper-consumerist culture.  

 

These abstractions provide the foundations for the vast array of systems of difference, i.e. the words, sentences, propositions, texts, memes, constitutions, etc in languages (fist oral, then written) which operationalised and formalised our earliest social structures - and knowledge (or the capacity for effective action).

 

It is obviously tempting to see all this as the basis for the wonderful 'freedoms' we all cherish - freedom from ignorance, from the restrictions of daylight activity, and so much more. But you have to be careful what you wish for. There are no free lunches in evolution - there's always a price to pay - starting with the knowledge of our own mortality, to the current epidemic of life-style diseases of obesity, etc, and ending up in the current self-inflicted 6th mass extinction, which we have now started.  

 

The next two developments (money and science) started to emerge concurrently (around the 6th Century BC), but then diverged into two distinct trajectories.

 

They were built on the earliest forms of commodification - of symbolic value - as language shifted from parole to parole and languethen to the dominance of langue, particularly as written texts and (much later) printing presses and finally digital networked media came to dominate. (See also The Structural Violence of Literacy, here ...

 

They then diverged into two distinct trajectories. 

 

The primary aspect of commodification is the stripping out context and subjectivity, (or in Marx's terms, transforming use value into exchange value), in order to make exchange and circulation possible beyond the boundaries of a specific context. The second aspect is the additional 'layer' of objectivity, and the attempt to achieve a truly 'universal value', and to achieve unlimited exchange and circulation of knowledge.  

 

Once again, the parole/langue distinction comes into play. For instance, speech is built up by i) 'every use becoming a sign of itself', and ii) the creation and maintenance of specific language (or discourse) communities, or a set, a network, a matrix of signs, algorithms, etc. Language may include, for example, the terms "force" and "motion".  But these same terms may subsequently, e.g. in Physics, also be used as scientific terms, with a much more specific, and restricted, meaning.  Or to look at it another way, a use may become a general sign of itself, and become part of the lexicon of a language, but it may also then be repurposed, as a 'scientific term', with aspirations to (ironically) restricting the manner of its use, whilst removing any and all constraints on the context of its future use in a particular context (e.g. 'science', academic discourse, etc).  (Add diagram and link). 

 

So commodification describes relationships across two domains: i) a (reversible) transformation between use value and exchange value (&/or physical use and symbolic use), and ii) the interplay between general use within flexible, open, speech on the one hand, and tightly specified 'technical' (or discipline specific) use on the other hand. This allows for a wide range of affordances and types of affordances - including both the flexible affordances of speech and the inflexible ones of formalised language in specific technical or bureaucratic disciplines/discourses. The latter are, in principle, also anonymised. 

 

But it also allows for confusion between these two types of affordances. The flexible ones function to their full potential only within open, complex-adaptive systems. The inflexible ones (particularly in the physical sciences) function to their full potential only within the subset of predictable systems. And predictable systems are - wrongly - most often seen as primary, more important, and even superior to all other systems - probably because they support the desire for total control - H. Sapiens' ultimate hubris.

 

* Trade, commerce, and financialisation (commodified value, and multi-derivative value)

The formalisation of trade and promissory notes into currency articulated the (reversible) relationship between use value and exchange value, with spin offs into surplus value, financial futures, derivatives, etc, etc. The borderlines were later tightened up to exclude increasingly troublesome issues, such as 'externalities', 'collateral damage', and more recently, 'sacrifice zones'. (add link) 

 

In the process, it created an entirely anonymised context- a subject-free zone, where the wealthy and powerful can play behind closed doors as it were, and, if they are good at the game, can accumulate endless wealth and power, in currencies of their choice, and in secrecy (add link). It's the age old meme of 'Swiss Bank Accounts' (banking by numbers - only), on steroids. It's called financialisation, or feral globalisation, see here ... , and 9/1/20 et seq., here ...

 

To call it 24/7 global is just to state the obvious. It was more insidious, and more complicated than that.  These are the first fully developed, hyper- and micro-global network, with spin offs into its 'sibling networks' (such as the micro-global terrorist networks) add link.

 

And ironically, modern bearer-bonds, a retro-version of the earliest promissory notes, still have a role to play too.  

(add links)  

 

*Science and Mathematics (commodified knowledge/intellectual value)

The formalisation of knowledge into science took much the same route - the stripping out of context and subjectivity - a process of abstraction that yielded objective mathematics, science and knowledge. By the same token, it yielded totally and rigorously commodified knowledge, which could in principle be circulated and used anywhere, anytime, by anyone.  Further protocols were added to some contexts: e.g. the notion of falsifiability - which more sharply distinguishes knowledge from belief, and which, unfortunately, tended to constrain knowledge into the straightjacket of positivism.

 

Objectivity is, interestingly, a slightly different flavour from its fellow meme of anonymity - part of the value of objectivity lies in its provenance, which is essential to its value, whereas the strength of anonymity is its naked and unadulterated currency, and the way it often glosses over the more rigorous requirements of falsifiability. (See for example, the critique of weak provenance in the article on the Uninhabitable Earth, here ...)

 

Much later, complex-adaptive knowledge was, begrudgingly, added to the debate. It is only quite recently (and not universally) that complex-adaptive systems, networks, and knowledge have been acknowledged as the overarching ontological and existential framework within which positivism is just a subset (and a rather diversionary one at that). See below ...

 

Probability is another matter entirely. It may appear to be a way of approximating the predictability of the hard sciences, but it is actually a way of describing the limits of our own certainty (or lack of certainty) about the behaviour of elements of complex-adaptive systems. As such it is very useful, but potentially very confusing too, particularly when it is elided into a form of 'soft-predictability', which it is not. Probability sits, beguilingly, on the borders of complex-adaptive and predictable systems, which is why it gives us good reason to act, but no reason to avoid the responsibility for our own actions, particularly within complex-adaptive systems. (See also the analysis of strategic knowledge, here ... add link)

 

Or ... is it the case that probability plays in both fields? i.e. does it have a legitimate role in approximating the predictability of physical events, and an equally legitimate role in modelling behaviour in complex-adaptive systems and networks?  If so, it is an even more powerful - and even more beguiling - set of affordances, and we should handle it will extreme care, taking care to unravel and expose the border lines between the domains of objective knowledge and strategic action (add link)

 

* Bureaucracy (commodified authority)

Bureaucracy (and its handmaids, law and regulation) also strips out context and subjectivity, and puts in place universal rules, later to be replaced by algorithms and the phrase "the computer says no".  In both cases, the people enforcing  the rules/algorithms are relieved of all responsibility - an amorphous 'higher' responsibility is where the buck supposedly stops at Ministerial level - although this is much celebrated nowadays by its omission - see representative democracy or elective dictatorship, below). In principle, this 'objective' commodification of the rules should deliver equity and justice.  In practice, it often commodifies the difference systems and prejudices of the ruling elite, which are usually at least selectively non-partisan, despite the protestations. 

 

The traditional Chinese take on bureaucracy was quite different. At its heart there seemed to be something similar, i.e. "the rules say no". But the mechanism to implement the rules was different.  All I have to clarify this is a story, but it's an interesting one. Sitting at a dinner table in Mafikeng one evening in the late 1980's, a Dutch consultant told us that he had just completed a very large, and potentially lucrative feasibility study for a renewable energy project in China. But when it came to sign the contracts for the project, there was a problem. The Dutch consultant asked about the relevant Chinese legal framework that might be used, only to be told that they had no such thing, as their system of governance depended on personal authority (and allegiance), rather than rules.  

 

The Chinese refused to sign the documents under the alternative - i.e. Dutch law, as they said that would disadvantage them. So everyone eventually had to agree to using Swedish law (and courts) for contracts and for settling contractual disputes instead. 

 

Presumably Chinese contract law has changed since then, no?

 

* Representative democracy  (commodified power)

Representative democracy in its crudest form is what Quintin Hogg (talking of the Westminster model) called elective dictatorshipOr as George W. Bush said on his second election to the US Presidency, "I now have a lot of political capital, and I intend to spend it".  Simples, as Trump, Johnson, etc, might say. There are of course more nuanced ways to translate votes into political power, like proportional representation, (and many hybrids too), but the core is still a meme that metamorphoses constituents power, and (with a bit of luck and good numbers) tells the electorate that it can go hang for the next 4, 5, 7 or whatever years.

 

Variants like the ANC model achieve the best/worst of both worlds.  In the ANC case, 'democracy' (or 'democratic centralism' - a remnant of the ANC's tutelage within the Soviet system) is a vote for a political party, not a person, and the party has absolute and unfettered control of who is on the party list, pre- and post- election. So, there are no by-elections; the ANC's unelected NEC just gets out its list (or makes a new one) and 'deploys' the next few party loyalists to Parliament - hundreds in the case of the first post-1994 Parliament.  And this despite solemn ANC promises before that election that this would be changed to a constituency based system as soon as possible after the first election - which has never happened. 

 

And if you are Tony Blair or Boris Johnson, (and in all likelihood Jeremy Corbyn if he had been elected in 2019) you can collapse the effective circle of power to just you and one or two non-elected SPADs (Special Advisors), and 'presidentialise' power in your 'elective dictatorship'.  Nice work if you can get it.

 

So it looks like we need to take into account not only Le Circle's book The 'Violence of Language' (and literacy), but also the violence of semiotics (and meta-semiotics) more broadly in most or all of these 'national institutions' of 'civilised power'. (add links)

 

* News ... (commodified descriptions of events)

News was, once upon a time, distinguished from opinion, propaganda, or just plain lies (see various dictators, as well as more recent arrivistes like Trump and Johnston (who has been fired more than once for lying to his media and political employers).  News was, then, defined as a description of factual events, even though that allowed quite a bit of lea-way for political slippage, e.g. statements like "protesters died" rather than "protesters shot dead by ..." (fill in the blanks). And even in news that quotes actual figures, it depends what exactly you (and more importantly, are not) counting. See here (add link), for some examples from Apartheid media. 

 

The basics are still valid: just as with academic research, news too serves a useful function in commoditising descriptions of events/scientific findings for circulation, so long as they are, in principle, backed up by good and transparent provenance. We cannot 'destroy' commoditisation (or capitalism), we live within it. But we can choose to limit and regulate its excesses.  

 

* ICT: digitalisation, nee "informatics" (commodified interaction)

Digital media provide the global networks for commodified interaction, although that has resulted in the multi-derivative skimming, accumulation and commodification of personal interaction and data, with 'you' as the ultimate commodity.  (See Zuckerberg's comment that his earliest Facebook clients were "dumb fucks" for giving him their personal data (see the full quote elsewhere in this wiki). The temptation of low (or zero) cost communication is great, but purportedly "free" services break that fundamental caveat that "there is no such thing as a free lunch". (See also "convenience data is like convenience food - tempting, but not really good for you").

 

Unfortunately, the internet has turned out to provide a whole range of affordances - for good and/or evil, and particularly for trolls.  This is nothing new, it's just (as we said at the beginning of this Ontology) yet another open (and potentially feral) system. 

 

  • The internet is, then, just a touchstone for all the many other elephants in the room 

 

The real obstacle to sorting out the wheat from the trolls on the internet is that the internet is just one example of our hubristic fantasy that open systems, per se, are free, inherently self-correcting systems, which we can just let loose, and sit back and enjoy the ride. 

 

The real problem is the necessity for appropriate constraints on all open systems - and not just on the internet.  All open systems only provide affordances for positive emergence within constraints and monitoring.  Moreover, if we call the internet out on this issue, we will sooner or later be obliged to impose similar constraints on all the other open systems (see above) - starting with the current worst offenders: the feral twins of international finance and global warming.

 

Of course the feral internet is in some sense a key issue. Berners-Lee is correct that it urgently needs fixing, but in other senses the problem of the internet - or more specifically the problem of feral social media - is just a symptom of the more general, age-old problem, i.e:

 

We have always pretended that our 'open' social systems are amenable to the same levels of 'scientific' predictability, control and intervention that physics provides. The vast majority of people are in total ignorance &/or denial about the fact that all biological and social systems are inherently complex-adaptive and non-predictable, and need to be managed accordingly.

 

That means we do not, primarily, need 'more knowledge', more derivatives/abstractions, or 'more science', but rather a completely new ontology which recognises emergence as fundamental and primary, and situates predictable systems as an existential and ontological subset within complex-adaptive systems.  

 

(That much misused term "false consciousness" comes to mind as a good description of the status quo).

 

That is not to say that the internet does not pose its own, unique problems, such as trolls, as well as:

 

  • The illusion of a 'victim-less' virtual world. On the contrary, words have consequences, sometimes fatal. (Ask Jo Cox's family, and many other victims of mass hysteria, fascism and pogroms - fill in the blank ... ).

 

  • Virtual exposure: The virtual world provides very tempting affordances for personal disclosure, and exposure, which can add personal and contextual richness to elearning, for instance, but which can equally get out of hand. 

 

  • Alone-together: Shirley Turkle has published important research on how the virtual world, and the IT-mediated world, can lead to a state of being 'alone-together'.  

 

  • Instant, viral and feral scalability: the speed and reach of what Knorr-Cetina called the micro-global world (a world in which micro changes (a single tweet, a single new species-hopping corona virus, etc) can escalate to global impact is unprecedented.

 

This means that our monitoring, vigilance, and rapid interventions (but light-touch interventions wherever possible) - which are the sine qua non of well managed open systems, need to be geared up an order of magnitude or more. The inherent instability of open systems, which is both their strength and their weakest point, requires comprehensive (and nowadays that means global, 24/7), attention and regulation, much more than ever before. (Our track record on this up till now has been dismal). 

 

  • Silos of 'knowledge': This is another inherent problem of hyper-connectivity and hyper-open systems.  (See Fractured Narratives and Pop-up Diaspora for more details (add link ....), as well as exponentially increasing hate speech  - including national leaders in many of the world's 'democracies' - e.g. Johnson (UK), Trump (USA), Modi (India), Bolsonaro (Brazil), etc, etc. 

 

* AI, machine learning.

AI, like many if not all the tools that the genus Homo has created within the affordances of modality-free 'thinking' (aka Gibsonian perceptive action) is a double edged sword.  0n the one hand, machine learning provides yet another, even more sophisticated set of tools for engaging with the world, but on the other hand, like all tools based on abstraction, alienation and commodification, it has tendencies to autonomy, to develop a life of its own - to go feral and/or viral. (See here ...).

 

 

A network analysis / genealogy of the new ontology: 

(See 4/12/19, here for more detail) (review this link ?)

 

In terms of this ontology, the key elements are:

 

1. Global (+), contingent, complex-adaptive, emergent systems, within which abstractions emerged and evolved to progress beyond existing limitations.  In the process, in the range of affordances expanded and evolved (both positively and negatively); including: 

 

* mobility - new affordances for moving between environments and environmental niches (including flight, bipedal mobility, etc).

* endothermy (warm-bloodedness), providing new affordances for night-time and cold-climate livelihoods, and '24/7' life styles. 

* multimodal perceptive action (add link ...)

 

2. Evolving to modality-free thinking, (which provides the basis for) ... 

 

2.1 Emergent, (oral) language-based socio-semiotics - i.e parole, (which provides the basis for) ...

 

3. The emergence of further layers and networks of abstraction, and commodification, i.e. capital development and application (in many forms: social, financial, cultural, legislative, GDP, etc), which include:  

 

3.1 The emergence of (social) media - i.e. systems and networks of setting down, capturing, recording and transmitting  (aka writing, or langue), which allow for the accumulation and dissemination of capital, as well as:

3.2 The removal of elements, and even chunks, of capital from the public, open domain, (aka parole), as well as from accountability &/or change.

3.3 The consolidation (&/or break-up) of various elites from time to time, based on varied (and even clashing) affordances that emerge from time to time and place to place.

 

These, in turn, emerge into our current social ecology, characterised in particular by:

 

3.2.3.1 (Potentially Feral) Open Systems

 

3.2.3.1.1 24/7 Global networks 

 

3.2.3.1.1.1 Financial markets 

 

3.2.3.1.1.2 'Social' media 

 

3.2.3.1.1.3 Fractured Narratives and Pop-up Diaspora

 

      .1 Terrorism

      .2 Populism 

      .3 Micro-targeting (the new capillaries of power)

  ?  .4 Micro/global structures

 

 

For action to be effective and sustainable (as in: knowledge is the capacity for effective action), it has to primarily satisfy the criteria at level 1. All the other levels are derivative, and increasingly, contingent.

 

See here for the full set of items that make up the ontology, and see here (add link) for a provisional map of how they relate to each other ...

 

NOTE: the rest of this page will, in time, be incorporated into either individual ontology memes (and pages) or into the preamble, above - watch this space (patiently) ...

 

 

This is an earlier draft of the Preamble, based more explicitly on resonances and knowledge ...

 

This is an ontology for the project on resonances of knowledges, and our 'emergent present'.  It emphasises the new, micro/global relationships in the instantly connected ecologies of our tribalist global village. Many of these terms are not new, but are, rather, emergent riffs on old themes which, in their practice, start to redefine their earlier versions, and become the new versions of the memes at the heart of the current cycles of social definition, distinction, description, and practice. 

 

Re-defining Knowledge 
Knowledge comes in many different forms and, with the internet, a lot more people see themselves as knowledgeable. This project takes that at face value, and explores, with an open mind, what people now mean by knowledge. It has definitely changed.

We all seem to agree that knowledge is the capacity for effective action.

 

That shifts the way we see knowledge from epistemology (how we know things) to pragmatics (how we use things) - or more precisely, it shifts knowledge into a single, fusion, field, called practical epistemology. This resonates with Gibson's work on affordances, as a single, fusion field called perceptive action, or active perception.  So, like many of the parts of this project, this is more about breaking down the conveniences of neat, separate terms and disciplines, and uncovering and exploring the implicit relationships between them, and the tools that we already have, than it is about creating new ones. 

 

So what's changed?  In the process, several things change: who decides what acceptable knowledge is, who decides what acceptable action is, and where and how does the acceptability (of knowledge and action) get decided? Or to put it another way, what should we do about the fusion/elision/confusion/merger & acquisition of epistemology by politics? Is that just another example of practical epistemology, or a perversion of it? 

 

In our networked, emergent, post/post-modernist, fractured global village, how do we manage our reference points, and do we still have any in common? [Aside: Metaphysics seems to aid and abet, and exacerbate this problem, but does that mean that metaphysics should be excluded from the domain of knowledge? Yes, if we limit knowledge and action to hard-evidenced description, but no, if we need to include a wide range of narratives that people employ to take action].

Part of what we can do is to work on the basics, towards a nested ontology of resonances, a new ecology of memes. It's a social ecology that, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, we have to take into account, and account for, for the future (of the planet, and of our children). Our pandoran boxes, to paraphrase Susan Blackmore, are already out of control, we need to try to keep the lid on what we have already got, and be more careful of the boxes that we (like exuberant toddlers - Trump being the worst example) have already opened. 

The point about resonances is that they can amplify practices and knowledge in paradoxical ways: either to close down variation and diversity, or to enable and even encourage the emergence of innovative practices and new knowledge/s.

The descriptive tools that we need to build a framework for our new social ecology form a nested ontology of dynamic, predominantly relational (rather than discrete and static), and reflexive (rather than linear) factors: e.g.

  • signs, which are the product of the dynamic relationships between two difference systems: signifiers and signifieds;
  • affordances, which are the product of the dynamic relationships between actors and their microenvironment;
  • identity, which is a reflective sign of the capabilities of of particular actors (i.e. what they can, and are prepared, to do, i.e. who they are), albeit consolidated within shared experiences in micro-cultures / fractured narratives / pop-up diaspora; and
  • strategic [or executive] knowledge, which is the product of the dynamic relationship between formalised knowledge, resources, and context.


Together, these describe the way in which agency and emergence is enabled, and balanced, by structure (or not).

 

Each of the elements of this ontology will outline how the term is used in this project, some of the shifts it has (and still is) undergoing, and its relationship to other elements in this ontology. 

 

 

The following are brief descriptions of items in the Ontology, which will be moved, soon(ish) to individual pages in the Ontology...  

 

Complex-Adaptive Networks (or Systems) produce emergent behaviour, based on frequent interaction of a multitude of largely autonomous agents, within large degrees of freedom, but within some - negative - constraints. This behaviour is not predictable, but it does makes sense retrospectively, giving rise to formalised, complex (as opposed to prescriptive knowledge.

Discourses are sets of texts and practices that order texts and bodies (animate and inanimate), with a community of interests. Discourses are the primary unit of analysis for meaning, identity, and power, not texts or signs. They are often embedded in particular narratives and cultures, and/or the disciplines of formalised knowledge.

e-rocracy (aka e-government) is one of the emerging morphs of bureaucracy, based on rule by (semi-autonomous) algorithms. e-rocracy merges what used to be called 'intelligence profiling' with the freemium business model. It may stray into the realms of click-bait, trolling, and even fake-news, and could make 1984 look like a naive preamble to the real thing.

Fascism / Totalitarianism

These are not necessarily the same thing, but they will provisionally be treated as such. 

Fascism, or fascist discourse can be defined as a regime in which people (usually selected people, though it might amount to just about everyone) has no place, no status to be 'at home' - they can never be fully present. They are either ghettoised to a place that is far from satisfactory, and is often just a holding place, a labour reserve, or even - e.g. in Gaza - "the world's biggest open air prison", or they are granted only 2nd class status - present only on sufferance to their neighbours, with whom they do not share an equal citizenship. See here ... 

 

But we can usefully add to that. In fascist discourse, language has been so thoroughly perverted that "there are no more words without values attached to them, so that finally the function of writing is to cut out one stage of a process: there is no more lapse of time between naming and judging, and the closed character of language is perfected, since in the last analysis it is a value which is given as explanation of another value " (Barthes), and we are condemned to communicate in the tautologies of bullies and fascists. See 30/7/18 Description, here ...

 

Fear is the opposite of resonance. Trying to describe Apartheid, and totalitarianism (more broadly) some years ago, I described it as a state in which you have no home, no place to be yourself, nowhere you can be settled. That does not mean that you have to be stationary - migrants can equally feel at home (in the desert, of all places). Being at home is a matter of finding a social space that is beyond challenge (from various forces - State, culture, nightmares, hunger, etc); home can even be solitary, see The quiet exuberance of winter .

But the opposite of resonance is not dissonance. That's too simple, too easy.

It's true that fear can 'throw people together', too, and even encourage them to find resonance with other people in the same state. But that's not a state of 'being'. Fear is unsustainable; it dies when the 'other' that it fears dies / away, and seeking to eliminate or even kill the agent/object of fear is quite understandable.

Feral Capitalism

 

 

Flame wars / Flaming are the result of deliberately provocative / rude / hurtful / threatening contributions to social media, and could be called viral obscenity wars for short. They can and often do go viral, and I suppose they are perverted attractors - of a destructive kind, if that's your click-bait / business model / personal profile of choice.

The Freemium Business Model ... provides services 'free at the point of use' which can create a community of users, &/or a captive (and closely interrogated) audience for marketing, influencing and resale. There is often a contradiction between 'free' and 'point of use', because: i) 'free' might include handing over your life profile, which becomes a commodity, owned, sold-on and used without your knowledge by any willing buyer, for any purpose they choose: and ii) the 'point of use' can be defined in ways that are anything but free, as many users of the NHS in the UK are now discovering, with the 'rationalisation' of services resulting in fewer and fewer, and more and more distant, 'points of use', and with the consumer now becoming their own ('zero-hours') sales assistant / proxy service provider.

The Global Village is where we find ourselves now. As McLuhan reminds us, from the prescience of his 1969 Playboy Interview, this is not a unified, consensual village, but rather a "tribalist" one, of adversarial, fractured narratives and pop-up diaspora.

 

Globalisation

Globalisation, like many of the memes that make up our latest social ontology, describes a new version in an age-old cycle.  These cycles are constantly being re-described, from the earliest migration of hominids from (multiple?) points in Africa and perhaps elsewhere, through several highly aggressive empires, through the technological revolutions of 'guns, germs and steel' {add link], through the Gutenberg 'galaxy', to the detailed emergence of the full implications of McLuhan's fractured global village. Our current point in the emergent cycle is probably best described by Knorr-Cetina's micro/global society (see elsewhere in this ontology). 

 
Identity (see also, agency)

 

Knowledge is the capacity for effective action. It is based on particular networks of resonance - from the most formal and predictive, through the complex-adaptive, to the most absurd. It may be stored, accumulated and shared in texts, &/or events, &/or in embodied practices.

Lightness
Light traces and short bursts of traffic are yet another paradoxical characteristic of our ambiguous / digitised / fractured / micro- global village.

On the one hand they are nothing new - they are text-book 'phatic' communications / resonances, e.g. greetings, which enable you to get in touch and stay in touch, but which have very little substantive content. [Aside: The isiXhosa song, and dance, phata-phata (or touch-touch - with some suggestive overtones) has serendipitous resonances with 'phatic' communication (even though 'phata' is pronounced with an aspirated 'p', rather than the 'f' of 'phatic')]. So, phatic communication allows you to open up communication with other people, with little or no commitment. Many greetings lead to nowhere in particular, but they do offer recognition, and affirm the other person's presence (see Big Bird's favourite line in Sesame Street "it's nice to be seen").

On the other hand, greetings may lead to a substantial conversations and interaction. This is the beauty of lightness - it's something you put out there for people to pick up on and take further - or set aside - as they choose. But it is the essence of emergence, change, and innovation in all open, complex-adaptive systems, which are based on 'multiple interactions between many agents, with large degrees of freedom' - sounds like a good description of Twitter.

However, emergence also requires some constraints - preferably negative ones (specifying what is not allowed to happen), rather than prescriptives ones (specifying what must happen). Without negative constraints emergence does not happen, and the communication quickly decays into noise, or into confrontations around prescriptive, predetermined positions - sounds like a good description of Trump. And then there is no recognition or mutual affirmation of presence, just an inflation of the presence of the speaker - and if there is any resonance, it's only with people who already share the speaker's prejudices.

So the affordances of lightness and short bursts of communication [and the phatic, asynchronous (largely) written texts of the new social media genres] can go either way - towards affirmation and emergence of a broader community, or to erect deeper barricades around existing prejudices.

It is, however, possible to develop the necessary 'negative constraints', and light-touch monitoring, to keep communication open: see for example the Open Source software community's protocols (particularly: "don't feed the trolls"). But that's a particular, constructive mode of 'free' speech, something quite different from a 'free for all' (e.g. what Milo et al tried to impose on others in September 2017).

The combination of lightness and negative constraints is, paradoxically, the basis for resilient emergence. Phatic communication, within such a framework, is an 'essential oil' for long-term, creative, stable, sustainable development. There is a world of difference between 'social' media and 'click-bait' media, but that has yet to filter through to hyper-monetised digital platforms, or to a broader consciousness. It is nevertheless a prerequisite for a sustainable commons.

Memes (see also, genes, memes and temes)

are ...

Meta-semiotics is ...

Micro/global structures (see also Globalisation)  
Knorr-Cetina's highly detailed description and analysis of the micro/global structures of international financial markets, and international terrorism are essential to this (emerging) ontology of the present.  The key factors are .... (WIP)

 

Modernism
... the delusion of a domain of ‘externality’ - called the market, or ‘nature’, (or both), which is i) always going to be resilient enough to mop up all the detritus, junk and pollution extruded from our modernist projects; &/or, ii) not ‘our’, first World’s (or the 1%’s) problem; &/or, iii) something that will be taken care of by God’s divine plan (fill in a deity/sect of your choice here); &/or, iv) the next generation’s problem, which wont affect ‘our’ children, because we will set up adequate off-shore trust-funds to take care of that. (See here ...)

Obscenity
Does an ontology for the Anthropocene need a a boundary marker, a description of where the domain of 'externality' begins, i.e. 'obscenity'? I think so, yes. (See the essential role of 'negative constraints' in building a sustainable, resilient (emergent?) social ecology, elsewhere ...).

To start with, obscenity is about excess, and Dickens's Scrooge is a good starting point. Billionaires can be defined as someone who would have to spend at least £1 million each year for 1,000 years to use up what they 'possess'. That's a good working definition for obscene excess. (Today's super-rich, £50x billionaires, would have to spend £1m per year for 50,000 years, and so on ...)

Secondly, a business model based on 'click bait' is just raiding the sewers of humanity, no? I would include that in 'obscenity' too.

Thirdly, the bling/gin palaces of the idle rich, both in the countryside and on the seas, are monuments, past and present, to obscenity. Where to draw the line? Taking a look at National Trust properties, for example, a useful line might be drawn between the tasteful approach of Nuffield Place, versus some of the monuments to bad taste that the NT carefully preserves (take your pick). (Nuffield was reputed to have been the 'richest man in the world' at the time he lived there. See also Jan Smuts's House, a wood and corrugated-iron house situated in virgin grassland, where he stayed while he was Prime Minister of SA, Chancellor of Cambridge University, ecologist and classifier of indigenous grasses, snakes, etc). (See also, Feral Capitalism)


Resilience is far too fashionable a term. However, it might be a better starting point than 'emergence' or (even more left-field), 'complexity'.

So, we might take resilience as a useful starting point, i.e: the ability of a network (of cultures, people, cells, genes, memes, etc) to adapt (and even self-correct) to changes in the micro- and macro- environment.

This is a particular reading of Darwin, and in particular his algorithm of "the survival of the fittest", which in the first instance has little or nothing to do with brute force (just ask those gigantic dinosaurs), and everything to do with the ability to adapt to change, to be nimble, creative, etc. The human brain's much lauded plasticity, H. Sapiens' extended neoteny (delayed sexual maturity) and our synaesthetic ability, are key mechanism for resilience, followed perhaps by micro-affordances (like the promiscuity of 'nucleus-free' bacteria), to mechanisms of selective gene expression, to epigenetics, etc.

Openness is ...


 


Synaesthesia
and ... Synaesthetic Ability ... and the origins of derivatives and avatars ...

Temes are ...

Work (see agency)

 

XAI Explainable Autonomous Intelligence (nee: 'explainable artificial intelligence')
There's the rub: explainable-autonomous, (or transparent-black-box) - totally oxymoronic terms, where the syllogistic and algorithmic chickens (of autonomous semiotics) have finally come home to roost.

An article in the NYTimes (26.11.2017), asked "Can AI be taught to explain itself?" Its a catchy title; but it puts the machine before the horse, as it were. The point is in the X: explainable to us, not to it/self. It cannot, precisely, be allowed to remain an 'x', a set of unknown variables, no matter how many [autonomous] 'internal dialogues' we are prepared to write into the software. Otherwise we are caught in a perpetually recursive loop [a defective program] in which the question: how did the programme make a decision? could just become and how did the programme make a decision on how to explain that decision? etc, etc, ad infinitum.

The issue is as old as the first proofs of the four colour (mapping) theorem, in which a complex, and opaque, computer programme successfully proved that four colours are all you need for any map. The question, however, is: How did we know that the computer wasn't cheating? We didn't. A proof, is the widest sense, must be replicable (and checkable) by humans, although in the case of this theorem this seems (?) to have been sorted out, eventually.

The point is that once the threshold of size and complexity of the data set / algorithm / network exceeds the human attention/life span, we're up a creek of our own making, without a paddle. Facebook, Google-search, etc are already potentially poisoned chalices (see 'foreign' state electoral interference in 2016/17) which we leave to the autonomous / hidden hand of the digital marketplace at our peril.

And when autonomous systems start carving out 'human-free' zones, as in California, which is phasing out botts dots (raised bumps that alert drivers when they cross a lane divider, or the edge of the road, because autonomous vehicles apparently don't understand them), we know we are in real trouble. Human-scale development might need to emphasise human-friendly highways on its list of must-haves for sustainable development (highways as in public throughways, not as in concrete neighbourhood dividers).

It's like creating a Silicon valley / global-hacker-customised-unconscious, which is coming back to bite us. Or creating a Swiss Banking black hole, into which a substantial portion of the world's disposable credit can be deposited, to be used anonymously, at will, for legitimate or illegitimate purchases (of power, commodities, favours, etc). At which point autonomous systems start to overlap/resonate with anonymous ones, in far too many ways.

All this sounds perilously close to the comment cited by Kuang from Tim Darell "'The solution to explainable A.I. is more A.I'" But Kuang does raise the pertinent issues: "Do the concepts that a network has taught itself align with the reality that humans are describing?" And he cites David Jensen: "we want people to make informed decisions about whether to trust autonomous systems ... If you don't, you're depriving people of the ability to be fully independent beings". (All references are to Cliff Kuang's NYT article, above).

The EU has started to address this, in a law (the General Data Protection Regulation) "requiring any decision made by a machine be readily explainable" - with fines to enforce compliance, from 2018. However desirable this is, whether it is practicable is moot: "It can be almost impossible to peek inside the [black] box and see what is actually happening". Kuang cites the by now classic case of Caruana's neural net algorithm for evaluating treatment for pneumonia patients, which worked just fine until someone noticed that it showed that having "asthma meant that a patient (with pneumonia) was likely to get better" than without the asthma - wrongly concluding that correlations implied causality (the oldest mistake in the book). Actually, the asthma patients were just considered more at risk, and were therefore given better care.

En passant ... the borderline between correlation and causality is more interesting, and more slippery, than meets the eye - particularly in AI (forgive the pun) - for other factors also come into it, chiefly intentionality and agency and the preferred affordances/capabilities of particular sub/cultures. Reflexive and emergent networks, and particularly self-reflexive networks (see also George Soros's analysis of financial markets as reflexive) are qualitatively different from machine learning networks.

And the difference is that we (self-defined cultures and communities) create and support independent agency, creativity and innovation in particular agents ('human adults' for starters), rights which can be withdrawn by those same cultures/communities. We already create spaces for independent, autonomous agency in machines - from our growing army of household appliances to 'smart bombs', for instance - but within confined constraints. Broadening the limits of those constraints means reducing our ability to constrain those 'learning' machines, and inevitably narrowing the set of people who can exercise those constraints, as well as reducing the time-frame in which they can do so (in the next generation of hypersonic ICBM's, coming soon to silos in America, Russia and China).

Articles 21 of the EU law "affords anyone the right to opt out of personally tailored ads" and article 22 provides the right to explanation: "EU citizens may contest 'legal or similarly significant decisions' made by algorithms, and appeal for human intervention ... or [the information providers] risk penalties of 4% of their revenue. Taken together ... [these articles] introduce the principle that people are owed agency and understanding when they're faced with machine-made decisions" (+).

That's the challenge.

And XAI as a new level of abstraction - road architecture WIP ...

 

 

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