"A Layman's Intro to Integrity"

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A Layman's Intro to Integrity?
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999

    I really appreciate hearing from you. (Only hope I can do justice to your questions! :-> )

You wrote:

    A VERY interesting site. As a complexity "groupie", I am fascinated so  far, but I'm not sure I understand what it's all about. You say emergence isn't magical, there is a contextual reason for it? That's where I lose you.   What paper herein is sort of a layman's explanation of your theory? Or is the math essential?

Also, why don't you put up a resume' of yourself. I'm always interested in the background of people who are original thinkers, but outside the official establishment. I guess I get some kind of vicarious inspriation from their lives.

Best regards,

Jerry Kurtyka

(my dear friend Diane Haugen is forever after me to 'speak plain'. Since I'm about to try, yet again, I hope you don't mind that I'm cc'ing her.  Thanks!)

Jerry,

Please understand that I like 'emergence' s underscoring theme ... novelty and newness .. as much as anyone. It's fun and it's challenging to the imagination. As much as science craves 'repeatability', the human spirit craves unfettered horizons. A few 'surprizes' here and there are good for the spirit and the soul.

I just happen to take a different slant.

It has always been my goal to shoot right for the essentials of existence, based on this proposition: The universe is a complex complicated but 'singular' entity. Everything in it is someway and somehow 'connected-with' and/or 'compatible-with' everything else. And I do mean everything else.

Even if things seem to be outrageously different or unassociated, there must be some connection and relation. Like the disparity between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. Like the behavior of any single atom, and something that you did in your own life today.

If we posit descriptive or behavioral novelty and uniqueness every time we look up and down the levels of how the heirarchy of assemblies are, then we'd have to posit that there is no guaranteed "association". Our math equations shouldn't work with the same applicability in molecular statistics
or biological speciation studies if that were the case. But they do. 

Even if new qualitative characteristics do necessarily arise in these transitions to new levels, something else - something inherent and shared - persists across these alternative frames-of-reference. I just don't see how it can be otherwise.

So the task, it seemed to me, was to look at what information we already had, and then pose the elements (ideas, relationships, functions, etc) and factors in some new way, so that we could over come semantic and symbolic specialization, and recognize an alternative view where the compatibility and similarities shine through, first and foremost. "Relativity" on the grandest scale. Every system or type of organization or whatever, were assumed to be sample enactments of one singular framework of behavior. The trick is to recognize the relational dynamics even in the diversity of mechanisms.

And, I assumed the universe isn't in the business of deception. Whatever this model was, it had to be so pervasive as to be in plain sight all the time. I mean, that was the original criteria, right? Everywhere, everything?!?

As a student in the 1960's I was heading into biology/medicine (mini c.v.: that was shortcircuited but I retained the way of thinking). The catch phrase at the time wasn't "complexity", but rather, "how do you take physics models (aka 'simplicity'/rigor) and end up with biology models (aka 'diversity'/openness)"?

Everyone was headed in the direction of looking for fields and forces and mathematical rules.

I went the other way ... I went looking for 'similar behaviors'... regardless of the fields and forces and mathematical rules.

Example: you and I can become 'behaviorally bound' (complex) by tying us up with a rope, but having us play a game of catch, by sitting in the same movie theater on the same night, by buying and selling things between each other, by connecting us through the internet, and on and on. The mechanisms don't make a never-mind. But it is quite possible that all these mechanisms share a similar characteristic that can confine us into a 'complexity'. In ways that have only limited connection with fractal mathematics.

The net net net factor is "communication". Some aspect is shared in a recursive and ongoing manner. That is the thing underscoring even fields forces and mathematical rules. It is the characteristic that other researchers saw, but casually set aside in deference to figuring out the specifics of those fields and rules.

The reason that fractal complexity is so special is not "emergence". The reason we see beautiful complexity come out of 'simple' equations, is because the functions were designed to be 'self-communicators'. Take a formula. Include in it some factor. Call it "n". Do the number crunching
and get a result. Make a map of the original number versus the result number. Take the result number and make it the new "n" of the equation. Repeat the process. Over and over and over. "Unanticipated" patterns will 'emerge'. Extraordinary!!

All valid. All true. BUT. The heart of the process is the information transposed back and forth again in massive iterations. Mathematical locuses 'communicating' with each other recursively. Generating complex (bound) relations (behaviors, enactments).

From that point, well long before actually, since I pre-date fractal complexity, I got into looking at the what, why, where and how of 'communication'. Early on (1972) I hit on the idea of a gaussian model, but one which could have a variety of interpretations. I never did like the notion of "maximization" of anything ... since that runs contrary to healthy behavior spaces (Lewin; "life space" (1935). Systems have to have the capacity and ability to get and give energy/information. Commerce, communication, etc all require a health state somewhere more than "empty" and quite less than "saturated". After that, we go on to figuring out 'tendencies' displayed by the interactions of these "gaussian bubbles" of existence.

Systems require functional guidelines to work under and open degrees of freedom in order to survive through any style or number of encounters.

And that's it in a proverbial nutshell. Everything else is neat and interesting detail. Including the notion that dimensional spacetime is the primal presence of "communication". I tend to look at existence as
unavoidably being a continuum, counter to the general view that it must be quantum. The very nature of "unbrokenness" implies connection - communication. Whether humans can appreciate the nature and source of it all or not.

I like Bohm/Hiley's ideas. I like the extraordinary potential that the spiritual aspects of existence are associated with this phenomena. And I like the idea that these 'essences', placed in such a perspective and connotation, means that essentially the Universe is a sentient entity in and of itself. Self sensitive, self responsive, on a scale that is awe inspiring, even as we are only beginning to glimpse the details of the machinations, how it might all work.

In my piece "Conscious Continuum" I broach the notion that humanity's original experiences of appreciating "the infinite" led along two paths that are really fraternal twins: Spirituality and Mathematics.

I thread my own path in both. :->

Hoping all the above sparks some interesting remarks from you ......

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