Posted by
Steve Smith on
Oct 09, 2008; 7:53pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-Self-awareness-tp1301801p1313696.html
Phil -
Spot on Phil. I'm CC:ing a friend (Aku) with whom I often discuss this
point (thus I'm leaving the cruft at the bottom).
Science's biggest failing (perhaps) is it's (natural) blind spots.
When I came to LANL in 1981, the Center for Non-Linear Studies was
pretty new and for the most part there was little, if any, study of
non-linear systems going on in the world. This was mainly because of a
lack of tools to work with nonlinear systems. Once (most) scientists
got over their fear of computation, many more complex systems could be
studied than before.
Like the man looking for his lost keys under the streetlamp even though
he dropped them a block away "because the light is better here".
"... because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we
know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we
know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown
unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." - Rummy
Rummy is the new Rumi?
The emerging work in Science studying itself (primarily through
studying Citation Networks) offers some hope that we can begin to fill
in some of the blind spots. Our own Marko Rodriguez & friends, for
example:
http://www2007.org/poster860.php
That is not to say (as you seem to here) that we haven't just filled
out a huge amount of unexplored territory only to create a similarly
huge number of unconsidered regions within that territory.
I'm not completely up on your view on this topic but there also seems
to be a theme regarding "far from equilibrium systems"? Is that what
you mean by "uncontrolled systems"?
carry on!
- Steve
Steve,
Well, might you also say science is self-organized to be 'robustly' avoiding
the subject of uncontrolled systems too??
If something doesn't come to your attention because you're only looking for
something else, it could seem to not exist. How do you explain the very
large variety of complex systems that take care of themselves somehow,
sharing environments with very low specific variety corresponding to their
evident highly complex internal designs and internally coordinated
behaviors?
Phil
-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:48 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness
Well said Russ. Science as a self-organizing system which is
relatively
robust and self-healing.
Russ Abbott wrote:
Richard Feynman said that "Science is what we have learned about how
not to fool ourselves about the way the world is." To the extent that
it achieves that goal, science works even without individual
self-awareness. That's really quite an accomplishment, to have
created
a way of being in the world that succeeds reasonably well without
having to depend on individual subjective honesty.
For the most part, if we aren't honest with ourselves and with each
other, we all suffer negative consequences. Now that I've written
that, it seems to me that "honesty with oneself" is not a bad
definition of "self-awareness." Another way of putting it is that
self-awareness is what keeps us from fooling ourselves about our
subjective experience. Contrast this with Feynman's definition.
Science works reasonably well even without individual self-awareness
in that it relies on community self-verification. In some ways
science
is the self-awareness of a community of people about what can be
known
about the world. Obviously science is not about everything -- in
particular inter-personal values. But within its domain I think it
does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved reasonably honest
-- and especially keeping the community as a whole reasonably honest.
There are failures and detours. But they are usually corrected.
I hadn't intended my original post to be about science. It was about
the importance of self-awareness when dealing with political and
governance issues. But now that we are talking about science it's an
interesting comparison. Perhaps that's why science has been so
successful. It's a methodology that isn't ultimately dependent on
individual human honesty. Can we say that about anything else?
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org