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"So I continue to believe both things: that statements about social entities and powers must be compatible there being microfoundations for these properties and powers; and that it is theoretically possible that some social structures have properties and powers that are relatively autonomous, in the sense that we can allude to those properties and powers in explanations without being obliged to demonstrate their microfoundations."
"Exploded view diagrams open up– a little –these black boxes so as to discern the multiple-composition that objects or units are as complexes of relations. What we discover is that every object is both a unit and a crowd of other objects or units."
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This is why there is not only a democracy of objects where every object is on equal ontological footing despite there being hierarchy and inequality among units, but also a democracy in objects. In Irreductions Latour notoriously says that “we will never do better than a politician” (1.2.1). Here Latour is referring not to state leaders (though them too), but objects or actants in general. Every entity that enters into relations with other entities is a politician insofar as it must navigate the tendencies or singularities of the other entities to which it relates.
Under certain market conditions, cartels arise naturally without collusion. This raises important questions over how the behavior should be controlled.
"To start: I've generally found the strictures of "microfoundations" and "agent-based explanations" as representing ontological constraints on sociological explanations rather than guides for empirical research. The constraints require, essentially, that all our explanations of social processes and causal connections need to be compatible with providing plausible micro-level accounts of how they work."
"The concept of microfoundations is relevant to each of these domains. A microfoundation is:
a specification of the ways in which the properties and structure of a higher-level entity are produced by the activities and properties of lower-level entities.
In the case of the social sciences, this amounts to:
a specification of the ways that properties, structural features, and causal powers of a social entity are produced and reproduced by the actions and dispositions of socially situated individuals."
"We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer online game. In their virtual life players use eight basic actions which allow them to interact with each other. These actions are communication, trade, establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack, and punishment. We measure the probabilities for these actions conditional on previous taken and received actions and find a dramatic increase of negative behavior immediately after receiving negative actions. Similarly, positive behavior is intensified by receiving positive actions. We observe a tendency towards anti-persistence in communication sequences. Classifying actions as positive (good) and negative (bad) allows us to define binary 'world lines' of lives of individuals. Positive and negative actions are persistent and occur in clusters, indicated by large scaling exponents alpha~0.87 of the mean square displacement of the world lines. For all eight action types we find strong signs for high levels of repetitiveness, especially for negative actions. We partition behavioral sequences into segments of length n (behavioral `words' and 'motifs') and study their statistical properties. We find two approximate power laws in the word ranking distribution, one with an exponent of kappa-1 for the ranks up to 100, and another with a lower exponent for higher ranks. The Shannon n-tuple redundancy yields large values and increases in terms of word length, further underscoring the non-trivial statistical properties of behavioral sequences. On the collective, societal level the timeseries of particular actions per day can be understood by a simple mean-reverting log-normal model. "
"Nomic is a game I invented in 1982. It's a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning); but this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves. The Initial Set of rules, some commentary by me, and some reflections by Douglas Hofstadter, were published in Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" column in Scientific American in June of 1982. It was quickly translated into many European and Asian languages. Games were regularly played, and kicked off, the ARPANET, the Defense Department network which sired the Internet. Nomic has been used to stimulate artistic creativity, simulate the circulation of money, structure group therapy sessions, train managers, and to teach public speaking, legal reasoning, and legislative drafting. Nomic games have sent ambassadors to other Nomic games, formed federations, and played Meta-Nomic. Nomic games have experienced revolution, oppressive coups, and the restoration of popular sovereignty. Above all, Nomic has been fun for thousands of players around the world. For me, it was intended to illustrate and embody the thesis of my book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, that a legal "rule of change" such as a constitutional amendment clause may apply to itself and authorize its own amendment."
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Throughout his post John draws a distinction between reality or the “really real” and illusion. But it is precisely this distinction that is undermined by the ontic principle. As I argue in my post on Flat Ontology, there are not two worlds– one consisting of the really real or “mind-independent objects” and another consisting of mind and the social –but rather only one world, the real, of which mind is counted as a member. Consequently, the first point to make is that the phenomena that take place in the mind regarding the game are themselves real.
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What is taking place in the mind regarding the game is an instance of what I call translation. The principle of translation states that there is no transportation of a difference without a transformation or translation of that difference. In other words, in the interaction between the game and mind a difference is conveyed from one domain (the game) to another (the mind). In being received by the mind– or, for me, more preferably, the brain –that difference is reorganized or transformed in a variety of system-specific ways precisely as John describes. However, the important caveat made by the object-oriented ontologist is that this process of translation is true not simply of mind-object interactions, but of all object-object interactions regardless of whether or not minds are involved. In other words, translation is every bit as much a phenomenon characterizing the interaction of rocks with sunlight as it is of frogs tracking “flies” and humans regarding the Game of Life. There is no object that receives differences from other objects like a glassy reflection in a mirror… Including mirrors themselves! Rather, for every interaction between objects there is a translation and a transformation. As such, translation is not an epistemological limitation that prevents us from ever getting at the “true things in themselves”, but is rather a general ontological feature of all inter-ontic relations among objects. Translation is an ontological process.
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Short critique of Emergence by Stephen Johnson (and inter alia other emergence popularizations) re: the confusions between small and large scale, face to face with computer mediated communication, and reflexivity.
The Presencing Institute (PI) is a global action research community that applies Theory U and presencing to the transformation of capitalism by shifting the social field of individual and collective action from habitual patterns to co-creating from the emerging whole. The presencing process is a journey that connects us more deeply both to what wants to emerge in the world and to our highest future possibility—our emerging authentic self.
in list: Philosophy Notes
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- knowledge is not an object, but a series of flows; it is a process, not a product
- it is produced not in the minds of people but in the interactions between people
- the idea of acquiring knowledge, as a series of truths, is obsolete
What is important is not who came up with the theory (because we know that what I will say is that the theory is emergent from the works of numerous writers) but rather what the salient points are of the theory. From the work just cited, we can identify three major points (and those who care to look will find those points repeated throughout my own writing):
- knowledge is not an object, but a series of flows; it is a process, not a product
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- These point to a conception of knowledge dramatically from the Cartesian foundation or the Platonic form, a conception of knowledge that challenges even the Aristotlean categpry and the Newtonian law of nature. In particular, what seems to me to be relevant, is that the knowledge thus produced is:
- non-propositional, that is, not sharp, definite, precise, expressible in language
- non-discrete, that is, not located in any given place or instantiated in any particular form
- non-objective, that is, independent of any given perspective, point of view, or experience
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Because that’s what this is. We—small businesses, startups, independents—taken as a whole we’re more than all the large-scale corporations combined. Maybe not in revenue, but that’s a hedge until I see the numbers. But in terms of work and knowledge and agility, we win.
Don’t care what those people in the big Old world think. That’s not a slangy lyric missing its pronoun, it’s a fucking imperative. Stop caring about what those people think. Stop golfing. Stop going to dawn breakfasts to rub shoulders with people who just got lucky and think being rich is proof of their acumen. Stop going to seminars. Stop asking.
Better you ask 100 random people for help—at the same time they’re asking you—than ask one Professional for Expensive Advice.
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