{"id":1073,"date":"2009-06-15T00:00:50","date_gmt":"2009-06-15T04:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2009-06-15T00:00:50","modified_gmt":"2009-06-15T04:00:50","slug":"human-dominion-to-negotiation-control-out-of-our-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/human-dominion-to-negotiation-control-out-of-our-heads\/","title":{"rendered":"Human dominion to negotiation, control out of our heads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kathryn McCallum had said on 6\/9,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I am interested in this idea of communicating the \u201csystematic tendency to overestimate human knowledge and control\u2026predicated on the premise of predictability\u201d as discussed very eloquently by my friend Kate Rigby in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.australianhumanitiesreview.org\/archive\/Issue-May-2009\/rigby.html\">Dancing with disaster<\/a>.\u00a0&#8220;It&#8217;s more like the practice of \u2018contact improvisation&#8217;&#8230;&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div>\n<p>Kathryn,<\/p>\n<p>Coming back to this, I\u2019d entirely agree that humanity is part of nature, and just feels alienated because our minds confuse us so much. We\u2019ve been trying to force nature into the shape of our thinking rather than work with nature, so I think discussing it as a switch from dominion to negotiation is quite appropriate.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I think the key to our reconnecting with nature, though, is being able to see\u00a0<strong>*how*<\/strong> and has to do with recovering our ability to distinguish between our artificial worlds and the real one. I think lots of people have the desire, but just not the technique.<\/p>\n<p>To me it\u2019s clear that being confused about what is real and what is not is \u201cin our minds\u201d, and so an emergent property of our gift for abstract thinking. That would make it thousands of years old, but to also say that at least some basic ways of reconnecting with nature are then possible.<\/p>\n<p>One starting point is with your observation that \u201cwe can predict\u201d, but that it fools us. We can only predict based on regularities of the past, is the catch, and nature can also be very irregular.<\/p>\n<p>How to have foresight about approaching \u201cirregularities\u201d is a large part of what my work is about. Some people call rule changing events \u201cblack swans\u201d because they spoil our predictions.<\/p>\n<p>If you consider nature\u2019s developmental processes as themselves \u201crule changing events\u201d, you can watch as their regularities directly stimulate the irregularities they invariably end in. Watching changes develop doesn\u2019t make rare things predictable, of course, but gives you excellent hints on where, when and for what kinds of rule changing events to look for.<\/p>\n<p>To generate the questions that help you find them I use the typical developmental life path for individual systems, (\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8.\u2022\u00b4 \u00af `\u2022.\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8). There is a sequence of six such rule changing events (if \u201cblack swans\u201d is what you call them or not) in the path from beginning to end for all developmental processes. There may be other kinds of rule changes and systems, but the physics seems to say this model is useful for raising questions about the organizational innovations that originate changes in direction for systems of regular accumulation, such as growth systems.<\/p>\n<p>It seems each period of irreversible developmental change (life phase) begins and ends with one. If you look for them, you won\u2019t find them in your model of the past, though. They\u2019re predictable exceptions to the regularities of one\u2019s models, or \u201cfailures of the past\u201d if you like. The catch is you have to look beyond the model to find them developing, out into the distributed processes of the physical system. You then use your certainty that change is coming to help gather clear evidence of when, where and how.<\/p>\n<p>How I figured that out is by observing that change as a physical process involves physically distributed systems, that can\u2019t possibly be in my head, and so can\u2019t possibly be a matter of relations between the categories in my head either! Organizational innovations in physical systems are nowhere to be found in our categories, &#8230; that is, <strong>except in questions about the world around us<\/strong> some model of observation may stimulate.<\/p>\n<p>Growth begins with a seed of organization and some free resource for it to use, for which there is no competition, a germ and a\u00a0fossil\u00a0source of plenty. It starts with using that resource to build up itself, becoming an explosion of new needs and relationships that take you where\u2026. you need to negotiate, something else. \u00a0 Negotiation is to become a partner of the things around you, eating only their leftovers to keep your partners alive! \u00a0 I\u2019m sure you\u2019d agree it\u2019s definitely not all bad to have that happen!<\/p>\n<p>pfh<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>ed 2\/14\/12<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathryn McCallum had said on 6\/9, I am interested in this idea of communicating the \u201csystematic tendency to overestimate human knowledge and control\u2026predicated on the premise of predictability\u201d as discussed very eloquently by my friend Kate Rigby in Dancing with disaster.\u00a0&#8220;It&#8217;s more like the practice of \u2018contact improvisation&#8217;&#8230;&#8221; Kathryn, Coming back to this, I\u2019d entirely &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/human-dominion-to-negotiation-control-out-of-our-heads\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Human dominion to negotiation, control out of our heads<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mail","category-econn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}