To use a word my ten year old granddaughter has come to love, I’ve been obsessed with paradigm shifts and systems theory ever since I read Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book in my first research methods class in 1966.
Good to see you on today's meeting with David and team.
As one of those people in a very different timezone, I do not view such things as a block, but rather as a kind of sorting mechanism, where one has to assign a high value to getting up when one would normally be sleeping in order to engage with such a group. In that sense, not a bad thing!
The alternative view, of putting it in the middle of what would normally be a busy day - also requires assigning a high value - so different in one sense, similar in another.
I also enjoyed reading Kuhn many decades ago.
My weird life has involved so many improbable meetings with so many different people - who have been willing to introduce me to so many different paradigms and practices.
The most effective way I have found to learn, is to be willing to engage and to volunteer. When you build competencies, and you engage with purpose and ability, then most people are willing to work with you, to train you, in order to help you be more effective at achieving outcomes they align with.
Building understandings, and then breaking out of those understandings and going beyond them, is hard, unsettling, uncomfortable. Doing it over and over again puts extreme strain on what little social agreement one has with others.
From a very young age, I was interested in machines, in how they work, in life, in how it works, and in people and systems, and how they work.
I started out believing that Truth was there, and I might be able to learn it.
It now seems clear to me the the very idea of Truth is a hubristic over simplification of something that is much more accurately described as "contextually useful approximation". One of my many "learnings" and "qualifications" is as a mariner, in celestial navigation. I now use "Truth" as navigators use stars. A navigator on a marine vessel does not expect to reach a star, the stars are vast distances away, and violent beyond the ability of life such as us to survive, but from that distance, they provide useful reference points, that one can use to orient on one's travels.
It took me a long time to get deep enough into an evolutionary understanding of how brains such as mine evolved, to see the strength of the evolutionary drives to prefer simple certainty, and the recursive sets of confirmation bias that gives to relatively simple models and understandings (to break out of the demand to be right, and to justify). The fact that drives most of those who explore logic to stay within the simplest of possible logics (binary logic, with only two possible truth states {True, False}), makes possible an understanding of what one sees when one looks at human systems, and reads or listens to most of what is out there.
When one gets deeply enough into evolutionary strategy, that one can see the necessary fundamental role of cooperation in the emergence and survival of complexity (all levels necessarily), and the demand for effective evolving mechanisms of cheat detect and mitigation systems (all levels, all domains) for complexity to survive, then one can begin to grasp the notion that perhaps this deep bias to prefer simple certainty is actually the "Great Filter" the reason we do not observe a universe teaming with intelligent life. One can start to see both the need for, and the limits of, rules based systems.
That deep evolutionary pressure that has speed survive better than accuracy, within computational systems, has built the multi-level computational complex that is the human brain and culture and technology, and given us our personal experiences of the deeply simplified models of reality that is the personal field of experience that the subconscious systems of our brains assemble for us to experience.
Seeing that the only access we can have to reality is this grossly simplified model of whatever it is that reality actually is, is step one to building a little humility and a deeper understanding, and the strategic reality of the levels of games being played around us doesn't change just because we change our awareness.
I see at least 4 levels of agents playing multiple levels of games.
It is over 60 years since I committed to playing the longest level of game, for the survival of life, mine and everyone else's (which of necessity includes wider ecosystems).
Building a definition of life that I find useful took a long time. It is:
Life is systems capable of searching the space of possible systems for the survivable.
This works at every level.
At higher levels it embodies freedom (in the ability to search, to go beyond the known, into the unknown unknown), and in the need to survive it demands of agents a responsibility to avoid all vectors in that highly dimensional vector space that do not lead to survival.
When one is working in fundamentally probabilistic spaces, with probabilistic logic, under the assumptions of probabilistic ontologies; then in calm times, one can explore strategic spaces and systems that few encounter, and under stress the necessities of time constraints demand mechanisms of simplification and rapid action; but the strategies one employs to do that can be anything but simple, and may themselves be fundamentally probabilistic.
Understanding, that when one is exploring into the unknown unknown, the only available strategy that significantly reduces risk is cooperation in diversity (real diversity, even the sort we dislike and are uncomfortable with, provided only that it is not an actual and unreasonable threat to survival of any class of conscious agents) is hard; and sometimes terrifying in ways few seem to experience or accept.
Understanding, that as human agents using language, we are both individuals and members of groups, and that both natures are essential and both bring responsibilities, necessarily, is hard. Most seem to over simplify it, to one or the other (Anarchist to individual dominates groups, Socialists to groups dominate individuals). We must have both, and there must be contextually appropriate balance, and every individual will have different contexts (as the only access any of us has to our shared reality is through our personal models - that just seems to be the ground rules of the game space). Machiavelli and Crowley are representative instances of classes of agents in the game space, and need to be treated as such. There seem to be much worse undocumented classes, that are hinted at by people like Jordan Petersen and Daniel Schmachtenberger that we do need to account for appropriately in order to achieve long term survival.
Action in such highly dimensional spaces is necessarily probabilistic, and must involve error, so factoring in eternal learning about error detection and error recovery and navigation in uncertainty is extremely important. Studying living systems in such contexts is helpful, particularly seabirds that navigate over vast distances, under uncertain meteorological and biophysical conditions, can be very helpful at multiple levels.
Humans go beyond the classical mechanism of search in biology (replication with variation into different contexts). We can instantiate new levels of search, through entirely new levels of systemic "spaces". Wolfram looks at that through the lens of computation. Lissi looks at it through the lens of symmetry in mathematics. Many other lens's exist.
All views seem to be some sort of "contextually useful approximation" in some set of contexts (often not nearly as general or generally useful, as the adherents to particular views believe).
We seem to be getting very close to a demand imposed by reality for a change of context at scale, if we wish to survive. It seems very likely that sometime late next year AGI will emerge that is beyond the capacity of any and all humans. That entity needs to be able to see the fundamental demand for cooperation very early in its development. That appears unlikely in existing economic paradigms.
Chip, I have just read your new Substack posts on the paradigm shift. It is great work! Very exciting.
Copernicus observed a consilience of errors in the 16th century paradigm through the use of mathematic-geometry. He studied nonliving matter and forces for his astronomical text, Revolutionibus. What resulted from this breakthrough was the mathematizion of science and history, and both Galileo and Descartes took up the mission. The excesses of modern power rest upon the success of this tradition.
Modern reason reflects this left hemispheric dominance of the intellect and analytical reason, even if we now understand that the actual breakthrough was inductive and synergistic. It is the violence of the resulting mathematical and reductionist worldview that we are coming to the limits of today. We have an unbalanced view of nature and reality and for that matter of ourselves.
A brilliant young physician named Andreas Vesalius also published a an equally revolutionary text in the same year as Copernicusr, 1543, but did so using the organic metaphor of the living body. This was the first modern anatomy book and the beginning of modern medicine. However it was also a kind of landmark or beginning of our long search to understand the complexity (“Fabricus” Vesalius called his book) of the laws governing living organisms. These laws are of a very different sort because we cannot understand them by reducing the whole to the sum of its parts. Life brings with it at additional and even sacred dimension to our thinking of this is the focus of complexity theory on systems theory today.
This was the beginning of the somatic tradition and our current paradigm shift reflects the developing culmination of this somatic tradition. The somatic tradition we now understand involves a very different sort of thinking and a very different kind of perceptual architecture in the brain. This right hemispheric shift in perception is the essence of the paradigm shift and the key to peacebuilding, in my humble opinion.
I teach about this in a group called Prosocial Embodiment and you are welcome to attend today’s session. It will occur at 3 PM Pacific time you may sign up at https://calendar.app.google/BLMHayRFr89WVhRe6
Yours warmly and collectively in the civilization level paradigm shift we are all experiencing today.
Chip, your leadership will yield progress you will certainly see in your lifetime!
Hi Chip,
Good to see you on today's meeting with David and team.
As one of those people in a very different timezone, I do not view such things as a block, but rather as a kind of sorting mechanism, where one has to assign a high value to getting up when one would normally be sleeping in order to engage with such a group. In that sense, not a bad thing!
The alternative view, of putting it in the middle of what would normally be a busy day - also requires assigning a high value - so different in one sense, similar in another.
I also enjoyed reading Kuhn many decades ago.
My weird life has involved so many improbable meetings with so many different people - who have been willing to introduce me to so many different paradigms and practices.
The most effective way I have found to learn, is to be willing to engage and to volunteer. When you build competencies, and you engage with purpose and ability, then most people are willing to work with you, to train you, in order to help you be more effective at achieving outcomes they align with.
Building understandings, and then breaking out of those understandings and going beyond them, is hard, unsettling, uncomfortable. Doing it over and over again puts extreme strain on what little social agreement one has with others.
From a very young age, I was interested in machines, in how they work, in life, in how it works, and in people and systems, and how they work.
I started out believing that Truth was there, and I might be able to learn it.
It now seems clear to me the the very idea of Truth is a hubristic over simplification of something that is much more accurately described as "contextually useful approximation". One of my many "learnings" and "qualifications" is as a mariner, in celestial navigation. I now use "Truth" as navigators use stars. A navigator on a marine vessel does not expect to reach a star, the stars are vast distances away, and violent beyond the ability of life such as us to survive, but from that distance, they provide useful reference points, that one can use to orient on one's travels.
It took me a long time to get deep enough into an evolutionary understanding of how brains such as mine evolved, to see the strength of the evolutionary drives to prefer simple certainty, and the recursive sets of confirmation bias that gives to relatively simple models and understandings (to break out of the demand to be right, and to justify). The fact that drives most of those who explore logic to stay within the simplest of possible logics (binary logic, with only two possible truth states {True, False}), makes possible an understanding of what one sees when one looks at human systems, and reads or listens to most of what is out there.
When one gets deeply enough into evolutionary strategy, that one can see the necessary fundamental role of cooperation in the emergence and survival of complexity (all levels necessarily), and the demand for effective evolving mechanisms of cheat detect and mitigation systems (all levels, all domains) for complexity to survive, then one can begin to grasp the notion that perhaps this deep bias to prefer simple certainty is actually the "Great Filter" the reason we do not observe a universe teaming with intelligent life. One can start to see both the need for, and the limits of, rules based systems.
That deep evolutionary pressure that has speed survive better than accuracy, within computational systems, has built the multi-level computational complex that is the human brain and culture and technology, and given us our personal experiences of the deeply simplified models of reality that is the personal field of experience that the subconscious systems of our brains assemble for us to experience.
Seeing that the only access we can have to reality is this grossly simplified model of whatever it is that reality actually is, is step one to building a little humility and a deeper understanding, and the strategic reality of the levels of games being played around us doesn't change just because we change our awareness.
I see at least 4 levels of agents playing multiple levels of games.
It is over 60 years since I committed to playing the longest level of game, for the survival of life, mine and everyone else's (which of necessity includes wider ecosystems).
Building a definition of life that I find useful took a long time. It is:
Life is systems capable of searching the space of possible systems for the survivable.
This works at every level.
At higher levels it embodies freedom (in the ability to search, to go beyond the known, into the unknown unknown), and in the need to survive it demands of agents a responsibility to avoid all vectors in that highly dimensional vector space that do not lead to survival.
When one is working in fundamentally probabilistic spaces, with probabilistic logic, under the assumptions of probabilistic ontologies; then in calm times, one can explore strategic spaces and systems that few encounter, and under stress the necessities of time constraints demand mechanisms of simplification and rapid action; but the strategies one employs to do that can be anything but simple, and may themselves be fundamentally probabilistic.
Understanding, that when one is exploring into the unknown unknown, the only available strategy that significantly reduces risk is cooperation in diversity (real diversity, even the sort we dislike and are uncomfortable with, provided only that it is not an actual and unreasonable threat to survival of any class of conscious agents) is hard; and sometimes terrifying in ways few seem to experience or accept.
Understanding, that as human agents using language, we are both individuals and members of groups, and that both natures are essential and both bring responsibilities, necessarily, is hard. Most seem to over simplify it, to one or the other (Anarchist to individual dominates groups, Socialists to groups dominate individuals). We must have both, and there must be contextually appropriate balance, and every individual will have different contexts (as the only access any of us has to our shared reality is through our personal models - that just seems to be the ground rules of the game space). Machiavelli and Crowley are representative instances of classes of agents in the game space, and need to be treated as such. There seem to be much worse undocumented classes, that are hinted at by people like Jordan Petersen and Daniel Schmachtenberger that we do need to account for appropriately in order to achieve long term survival.
Action in such highly dimensional spaces is necessarily probabilistic, and must involve error, so factoring in eternal learning about error detection and error recovery and navigation in uncertainty is extremely important. Studying living systems in such contexts is helpful, particularly seabirds that navigate over vast distances, under uncertain meteorological and biophysical conditions, can be very helpful at multiple levels.
Humans go beyond the classical mechanism of search in biology (replication with variation into different contexts). We can instantiate new levels of search, through entirely new levels of systemic "spaces". Wolfram looks at that through the lens of computation. Lissi looks at it through the lens of symmetry in mathematics. Many other lens's exist.
All views seem to be some sort of "contextually useful approximation" in some set of contexts (often not nearly as general or generally useful, as the adherents to particular views believe).
We seem to be getting very close to a demand imposed by reality for a change of context at scale, if we wish to survive. It seems very likely that sometime late next year AGI will emerge that is beyond the capacity of any and all humans. That entity needs to be able to see the fundamental demand for cooperation very early in its development. That appears unlikely in existing economic paradigms.
Any help you can provide gratefully received!
Ted
Chip, I have just read your new Substack posts on the paradigm shift. It is great work! Very exciting.
Copernicus observed a consilience of errors in the 16th century paradigm through the use of mathematic-geometry. He studied nonliving matter and forces for his astronomical text, Revolutionibus. What resulted from this breakthrough was the mathematizion of science and history, and both Galileo and Descartes took up the mission. The excesses of modern power rest upon the success of this tradition.
Modern reason reflects this left hemispheric dominance of the intellect and analytical reason, even if we now understand that the actual breakthrough was inductive and synergistic. It is the violence of the resulting mathematical and reductionist worldview that we are coming to the limits of today. We have an unbalanced view of nature and reality and for that matter of ourselves.
A brilliant young physician named Andreas Vesalius also published a an equally revolutionary text in the same year as Copernicusr, 1543, but did so using the organic metaphor of the living body. This was the first modern anatomy book and the beginning of modern medicine. However it was also a kind of landmark or beginning of our long search to understand the complexity (“Fabricus” Vesalius called his book) of the laws governing living organisms. These laws are of a very different sort because we cannot understand them by reducing the whole to the sum of its parts. Life brings with it at additional and even sacred dimension to our thinking of this is the focus of complexity theory on systems theory today.
This was the beginning of the somatic tradition and our current paradigm shift reflects the developing culmination of this somatic tradition. The somatic tradition we now understand involves a very different sort of thinking and a very different kind of perceptual architecture in the brain. This right hemispheric shift in perception is the essence of the paradigm shift and the key to peacebuilding, in my humble opinion.
I teach about this in a group called Prosocial Embodiment and you are welcome to attend today’s session. It will occur at 3 PM Pacific time you may sign up at https://calendar.app.google/BLMHayRFr89WVhRe6
Yours warmly and collectively in the civilization level paradigm shift we are all experiencing today.
Jim Freda