An interaction metaphor
Fortunately, we can draw on many others who have already established strong scientific, philosophical, and mythopoetic foundations for the work we want to do. Unfortunately, these exist as fragments of an unfolding story that has yet to be realized as a coherent composition. In an upcoming SEEDS essay, I will explain how metaphor governs our fundamental organization of reality, and is the basis not only for ordinary language, but also function as “interaction metaphors” --- blending inchoate ideas and intuitions into coherent wholes.
Over the past several months I have been meditating on what we might use as interaction metaphors for a new theory of the body. This is tricky, It has to do the work of bridiging across what we normally think of as different domains and categories (matter, life, mind) as well as different scales (individual, ecology, society).
These first series of posts, coming before we start the course, introduce us to varoius interaction metaphors that will help 1) build robust, non-reductive mental models of the deep continuity and aliveness of the body-mind-world and 2) be able to throw away the mental models that are malware, and inhibit us from realizing the truth of who we are, how we are, and why we are in relation to this remarkable and stunning world. 1
Years ago I bumped into an interesting term that John Heron used to describe how people make collective meaning together. He used the term “up-hierarchy.” A quick google search returns surprising results --- there is little reference to the term at all.
I myself had used the term in a couple of Medium articles 2 on Sensemaking in Open Participatory Organizations. There I defined it as “sensemaking up-hierarhcy” as distributed sensing that leads to collective sensemaking, where
decision choices are reported upwards as actions taken, rather than downwards as instructions to be followed … [a process that] describes the up-flow of sensemaking processes from proximate (near the action [and in local context]) to distal (further away from the action)3
I borrow the terms “proximal” and “distal” from Jason W Brown’s microgenetic process theory of human experience. It maps directly on what we know about local and global processes in the human “brain” and new work in 4E cognitive neuro-phenomenology also echoes these notions of global waves or flows. This suggests that the up-hierarchy heuristic can be used across different scales and more precisely point to their fractal-like simularities and continuity.
Words like “poximal” and “distal” help us avoid the unfortunate terms like “lower” and “higher.” Instead of creating a mental model of a ladder, they create the metaphor of wave-like-action unfolding. Furthermore, process philosophy uses the terms “prior” and “posterior” instead of “earlier” and “later” or “before” and “after” to avoid some of the connotations of the other term pairs. For example, “prior” also means primary, foremost, greatest and leading, while the term “earlier”--- so overused in developmental psychology, tends to make us think of being younger, lesser, under-developed. We will add the term “latent” which, when related to prior-posterior, enables us to stretch the wave out into successive, overlapping phases, where the posterior-edge of the previous wave, bleeds into the latent edge of the incoming wave.
Side Bar
First, however, for many of you reading this, there will be a tendency to create a mental model of an up-hierarchy and reify it as a holarchy. This is where the transformation in our understanding must happen. So let me stamp it into your consciousness: an up-hierarchy is not a holarchy!
To get your mind off the holarchy model, it may be helpful here to watch Rich Blundell’s video series on the continuity of universe, life and human culture.
Up-hierarchy, too, then, is one of the interaction metaphors we will employ in the course. We can envision the nature-body interaction as an up-hierarchy; the body-mind interaction as an up-hierarchy, and collective human intelligence as an up-hierarchy. Up-hierarchies are self-organizing and participatory. The tricky thing is, they can easily switch into down-hierarchies in the person and the human collective. When this happens all the agency at the proximate levels --- where the sensing happens--- is subsumed (given over to/ taken over by) the agency at the distal layers--- where the information becomes generalized, abstracted, chunky, coarse-grained.
This is what happens when we think that increasing the complexity of our thought is a way to understand the natural world. When in reality, complex thought is very far along the distal end of the sensemaking up-hierarchy. So it is to the senseful, sensitive, and sensing capacities of the body, that gets us closer to understanding the actual interactions and outcomes we have with the natural world.
This is what happens when we take the thought that sums up our life with story, to be more relevant to our lives, than the immediate, embodied disposition we cultivate moment to moment.
This is what happens when we mistake the moral imperative that rules the world, for the self-to-self encounter from which the imperative flows and by which we should be guided (rather than ruled).
Previewing what’s next:
The notion of an up-hierarchy is a good way to get us started on transformations of mind and imagining new mental models for a new theory of the body. In a next post, I will talk about a different transformation that comes from process theory--- internal and external relationships. This will help us be less confused about the relations between parts and wholes.
For example,
- the seed that is part of the tree, is not the same as the seed which is the whole that the tree grew from.
- in built things, parts are prior to the wholes… I have to have the lumber before I build the house, the steel before I build the car but…
- in generative, organismic processes, the whole is prior to the parts and… wholes evolve from prior wholes What other kinds of paradox / confusion around parts and wholes can you think of?
Further Resources
Footnotes
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In some ways we are reluctant to discover the truth, because we fear we will be facing all the myths that say people are cancerous growths on an otherwise perfect earth, that we are war-mongering, death-delivering, monsters who will destroy this planet in order to escape the solar system, only to repeat our ravaging ways. On the other hand, actually discovering that we belong, are welcomed and loved by nature, would demand an upheaval of self-soul and psyche, the likes of which we have never seen before. ↩
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https://medium.com/agile-sensemaking/sensemaking-up-hierarchies-a4eea852c139\ https://medium.com/agile-sensemaking/sensemaking-in-organizations-pt-3-248adea59609 ↩
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Interestingly, I found, while looking back at these articles, that the notion of sensemaking up-hierarchy can serve as a powerful interaction metaphor for platform design:
Global updates means that when one of the agents (nodes, machines) learns something new, every member of the network can be updated with the new information; and every new member of the network arrives fully “up to speed.” Humans, on the other hand, learn individually, mostly through trial, error and on-going experience. Unlike AI, and similar to all other living agents, human learning is not rule-bound, but based on protocols and affordances. The dance of protocols-and-affordances is what we call “experience” in the human endeavor. This is a feature that educators consistently fail to recognize, and is a major reason why machines seem to be out-performing people on “intelligence” since we have slowly but surely come to define learning as a rule-bound function.
Global updating means information that flows from local events and out in all directions. Above a certain scale, however, too much information can easily overwhelm individuals in the network. Therefore, we need to design appropriate constraints that “gate-keep” information flows in smart ways.
Self-organizing information in human systems means identifying patterns in the information flows that organize meaning into larger wholes. This is the “up-cycle” in the sensemaking up-hierarchy. In turn, these larger wholes, when redistributed “down” in the network, compose new contexts for local action. This is the “sensemaking” aspect of the sensemaking up-hierarchy. An adequate design will compensate for the need for human systems to gate-away information to avoid overload, because the function of global update is not so much that every node holds every data point (that is true for AI, because it lacks sensemaking ability), but for every agent to be working in an updated context. As complexity increases, contexts continuously shift. Hence, there is no doubt that AI must be a reliable partner in designing and operating sensemaking up-hierarhcies. But this partnership should be able to out-perform strictly rule-bound AI systems, in the context of what matters most to people, and the particularly human challenges we face on our planet today.
This is important to the development of a Convivial Society, because one of its pillars is Platform Design--- the domain of digital technologeis. Specifically, a Convivial Society means the re-invention-re-imagination-re-enchantment of
- Food, Farm // Health and Well-Being // Education
- Environmental Restoration // Ontological Design
- Platform Design// Information Flows // Energy Flows
- Governance