Preliminary Questions on Hierarchy Theory
"In the artificial world, a hierarchical architecture is often advantageous. It is hard to think of any complex human-made system – from brick buildings to software systems, societies, and institutions – that does not have a hierarchical structure. ...a system with a large number of components is unlikely to be efficient and stable if it is not hierarchically organized. Of course, this does not mean that hierarchy guarantees efficiency and stability. When a hierarchical system is too deep (too many levels) and too rigid (too strong top-down controls), its performance is doomed because of low efficiency and low adaptability." Jianguo Wu
If the question regarding hierarchy is one of functionality, efficiency, instrumentalism, then I can only wonder how this idealism prevents itself from going down the road of tyranny? I think this is a serious question. As far as I understand Hierarchy Theory, the measurement is one of success in terms of efficiency. One is trying to bring order to chaos, of course, some claim to see the world ordered in terms of hierarchy, 'that this is the way complexity is ordered in the natural system.' Is the observer then constructing the hierarchy the same way he would construct a God? “...complexity may lie in the structure of a system, but it may also lie in the eye of a beholder of that system” Herbert A. Simon
The question I have for hierarchy theorists is how the structuring of such a system avoids the arbitrary negation or deprivation of potentially valuable parts that have been deemed at a lower level of value? One can apply a hierarchy model, one can even get results, but in order to know that one is not doing more damage, by the schematic structuring of the system, one must be able to contrast it with alternatives, more than that, one must be able to locate the thwarting of potential, developmental value. I think there is something that gets closer to the heart of the issue, the quality function of humans hinges on their physical and psychological environment. It seems to me the principle of hierarchy (in the case of human life) must elevate the maturation environment of the individual in order to obtain the greatest social results. It would seem that this logically follows from the conclusion that structures can only be as strong as the quality of their individual parts/ at the same time there is a dialectic here, the individual parts receive their quality from the nature of the whole.
The danger is the schematic structuring of a negative hierarchical system that serves to undermine the development of human intelligence, or what is worse, a form of instrumental tyranny that justifies itself on the basis of efficiency and scientific theory.
If the question regarding hierarchy is one of functionality, efficiency, instrumentalism, then I can only wonder how this idealism prevents itself from going down the road of tyranny? I think this is a serious question. As far as I understand Hierarchy Theory, the measurement is one of success in terms of efficiency. One is trying to bring order to chaos, of course, some claim to see the world ordered in terms of hierarchy, 'that this is the way complexity is ordered in the natural system.' Is the observer then constructing the hierarchy the same way he would construct a God? “...complexity may lie in the structure of a system, but it may also lie in the eye of a beholder of that system” Herbert A. Simon
The question I have for hierarchy theorists is how the structuring of such a system avoids the arbitrary negation or deprivation of potentially valuable parts that have been deemed at a lower level of value? One can apply a hierarchy model, one can even get results, but in order to know that one is not doing more damage, by the schematic structuring of the system, one must be able to contrast it with alternatives, more than that, one must be able to locate the thwarting of potential, developmental value. I think there is something that gets closer to the heart of the issue, the quality function of humans hinges on their physical and psychological environment. It seems to me the principle of hierarchy (in the case of human life) must elevate the maturation environment of the individual in order to obtain the greatest social results. It would seem that this logically follows from the conclusion that structures can only be as strong as the quality of their individual parts/ at the same time there is a dialectic here, the individual parts receive their quality from the nature of the whole.
The danger is the schematic structuring of a negative hierarchical system that serves to undermine the development of human intelligence, or what is worse, a form of instrumental tyranny that justifies itself on the basis of efficiency and scientific theory.
Comments (110)
Quoting JerseyFlight
That's how hierarchy theory works. It is about the dialectical interaction between parts and wholes. And the two have to complement each other for the structure to persist.
So the whole - the global scale of the system - has to provide the constraints that shapes the right kind of parts. And the parts have to have the right kind of shape to meet the goals of the whole. The parts, in all their freedom, have to be acting in ways that re-construct that whole, in other words.
Think about an army. You need soldiers that act like soldiers and generals that act like generals.
That is the soldiers need to be good at acting on the ground in ways that produce a functional army. They must have the right habits to deal with the here and now of any combat situation.
Then the generals in their field headquarters need to be good at acting in ways that also produce a functional army. They must make the broad command decisions that shape the local combat situations as they will likely pop up during battle.
The hierarchical organisation works because it has a global view which gives shape to the local action. And the local action has enough of a view - enough of its own creative freedom - that on average it produces the kind of result which keeps the army rolling.
The notion of a hierarchy has gathered a lot of negative connotations. No one wants to get told what to do. No one wants to be on the bottom rung of anything.
But if you want a system that is intelligently adaptive, then it needs to have this kind of organisation. It needs to be able to apply its intelligence over multiple scales of being, multiple spatiotemporal horizons of action.
If the balance between the local and global scales are right, then the right outcomes will result. The local scale will continue to construct the whole, and the whole will continue to give coherent form its own parts. The system will survive and function, locked into a dynamic of mutual benefit.
And part of the dynamic is that there is internal mobility. Privates can get made generals. Generals can get busted to privates.
Or at least this is part of the democratic ideal we instinctively understand as being a smart way to operate.
I thought it was about organizing complexity into hierarchical structures? The notion of "complement" could be problematic here.
Quoting apokrisis
"The right kind of part," this is where it gets into it. "Right kind of shape to meet the goals," [of the system]. Surely you admit this is not a straight-forward or uncontroversial process? I am not claiming that hierarchy theory is false or that it should not be utilized, these are just my preliminary thoughts. What concerns me is a kind of instrumental tyranny. How does the system avoid this? What criteria does it use to determine what is "right?" How does it come to generate its idea of "goal?"
I imagine at the end of the day, depending on how this is calculated (and I'm not sure that pragmatism is good enough here) the creation of a kind of tyrannical hierarchy. Why is this not a potential danger of the system?
Usual evolutionary logic applies. If it works, it will survive.
Quoting JerseyFlight
What would that tyranny look like? How often would it occur in Nature where hierarchy theory is all about self organising systems?
Tyranny could possibly look like a hierarchy systems model that organizes society in such a way that it ends up negating value. A so-called scientifically justified class structure. As I said in my introduction, "one must be able to locate the thwarting of potential, developmental value."
However, it should be made clear that all human systems of organization, including religion, face this same dilemma. It is not unique to any one system.
Quoting apokrisis
I have a hard time embracing the idea of self-organization in terms of Nature. Further, it is not clear to me that Nature's movement (I purposely did not call it organization) provides a model of intelligence for human society. I believe thought may be the only thing suited to such a procedure. If you are talking about mimicking patterns you claim to find in Nature, I would need more than just the fact that you believe you found a pattern, and therefore it automatically becomes normative, designated a form of intelligence.
Right. So the theory says top down constraints and bottom up construction must be opposed forces in balance. And guess what? Humans figured out that democracy was a good idea because it could balance those two aspects of social organisation - local scale competition and global scale cooperation.
From the functional view of hierarchical organisation we can of course also diagnose the dysfunctional.
[Quoting JerseyFlight
What you believe is neither here nor there.
No friend, this is the most common distortion of Hegel. This is refuted in Jon Stewart, Hegel Myth and Legends. :smile:
I've seen the YouTube video where it's claimed the formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is not in Hegel. But I've read it in Hegel! He simply uses more than three terms at times in his syllogisms
My questions are meant to probe Hierarchy Theory in terms of its general framework, not the specific findings of any one theorist. While I agree with Democracy, my questions are along the lines of, is it possible for a Hierarchy theorist to arrive at an alternative conclusion, meritocracy perhaps? As I understand it, we are talking about the successful arrangement of complex information? What is informing the calculation of success here? As I see it Hierarchy Theory would not specifically mean the conclusion of Democracy.
Then you will have to cite it.
Being+Nothing=Becoming is one example
As you see it? If you knew something about hierarchy theory, then your opinions might carry more weight.
I gave you a simple example of the organisation of an army. If you can think of a better alternative functional structure, than present that.
Which is the more intelligent and effective fighting force, the Greek citizen-soldier hoplite or some barbarian horde?
Quoting JerseyFlight
What I am talking about is the natural logic of hierarchical organisation. It is the obvious way that Nature is going to arrange itself to achieve any function or finality.
Human social order is just one tiny example.
It is my goal not to get caught up in anything personal here. I would not have started a thread on Hierarchy Theory if I didn't have a basic understanding of it. But that is just it, my understanding here is only basic, that's why this thread is title Preliminary Questions. I appreciate your discourse because you are well versed in Hierarchy Theory.
As per your army analogy,"the soldiers need to be good at acting on the ground in ways that produce a functional army. ...the generals in their field headquarters need to be good at acting in ways that also produce a functional army."
The question of functionality is just my point. One can produce a system that is functional, while at the same time lacking intelligence, thwarting of potential value, unless you claim that functionality is synonymous with intelligence and value inflation? That is, where you have functionality there you also have the maximization of value. This premise is difficult for me to embrace. My concern is whether or not the formation of a hierarchical system could produce functionality, while at the same time negating potential value?
Quoting apokrisis
I see that you are calling it "natural," but my point is that if true, 1) this wouldn't automatically make it a form of intelligence and 2) this notion of natural order could be used to justify a system of hierarchy, that though functional, would ultimately lead to the negation of value.
The brand of hierarchy theory I am talking about is the one that comes out of theoretical biology. So it is the modern science-based view of self organisation in nature. But it also reflects the long tradition of organicism and dialectics in metaphysical thought. As such, it embraces finality as a fundamental cause - one half of the dialectic which is final cause and efficient cause (or alternatively, formal cause and material cause).
Thus functionality is a general way to talk about final cause. And this finality can be just a "dumb" material tendency - the kind of brute physical goal encoded in the Laws of Thermodynamics. Or it could be the "intelligent" desires of some human community.
Hierarchy theory is broad enough to span the full gamut of natural teleology. And it in fact constructs its hierarchy on the emergence of grades of telos - physics at the bottom, human psychology at the top.
So your remarks don't feel accurately target. You already have some distorted impression about hierarchical organisation. And that leads you to seek some wedge complaint like "functional doesn't necessarily mean intelligent".
But hierarchy theory already deals with that. Functionality is Nature self-organising in ways that permit it to actually exist - as a persisting flow or process. It is simply an expression of the evolutionary principle.
That is neither "dumb" nor "intelligent". It is simply the logic of nature. To want to paint it as dumb or intelligent is to believe nature must meet some human standard of behaviour. Or worse yet, the standard of some divine intellect.
Quoting JerseyFlight
It "automatically" subsumes any notion of what counts as being intelligent or valuable.
You are applying the perspective of transcendent idealism. You speak of intelligence and value as if they are Platonic finalities. That leads you to complain about the huge potential for the real world to be imperfect when held up against the shining example of the thoughts in the mind of some divine intellect.
The whole point of hierarchy theory - as an expression of natural philosophy - is to instead accept that the world creates itself through its own emergent self-organising logic. Nature is rationally structured because that is what works. So no need for creating gods. This is a metaphysics of immanent bootstrapping.
You are talking about hierarchies being a choice. And as humans, we do think we can design our own social systems. But how much freedom do we really have on that score?
I think your comments reflect the unrealistic expectations people build up because they don't look close enough at actual human society and fail to appreciate the telos it ends up pursuing.
Why are we so "dysfunctionally" burning fossil fuel and living it large as a species of consumers? Well, hierarchy theory tells us that natural systems are naturally focused on just that mission of maximising entropy production.
And if you look far enough into the future and discover you don't like where that leads, then you need to "intelligently" turn the ship around.
Either that or civilisation collapses.
And what of it, in Nature's eyes? Another failed species to add the long list. Or maybe even a successful species that popped up to liberate a geologically trapped store of entropy in a sudden exponential burst, then departed the scene, job well done.
To start saying Nature has to choose - either decide to be smart of dumb - is to lapse back into transcendental idealism. It is pretending that the human mind in all its proven short-sightedness is somehow also the divine ideal informing metaphysical existence.
At best, humans are a particular complex expression of Nature. And hierarchy theory gives us the dialectical logic of how Nature could immanently self-organise its way into such a state of complexity.
Hard to see how it could be any other way, though I suppose in social terms the relationship here is dialectical, one accounts for the quality of the other.
Quoting apokrisis
What I am getting at is simply the question of thought's mediation. We used to eat each other. One could argue that because that was the way nature organized itself, therefor it comprised functionality. And in a real sense I suppose it did, but we can see a greater functionality beyond it. To observe human society at the point of cannibalism and then conclude that this is nature organizing itself... What am I missing here?
Quoting apokrisis
This is not my position. My position is that nature is not a standard. My position is that intelligence can construct better procedures. What I am against is the dumb declaration that what we observe in nature is somehow a standard of intelligence in terms of social process.
Quoting apokrisis
If by this you mean, what you observe, and then claim to demarcate as natural order, automatically incurs to itself intelligence or value, this is what I do not accept. I do not deny that we find processes in nature, but just because we find humans eating each other at some point in history, is not enough to claim that this automatically makes it a process of intelligence or value just because we find it bin nature.
I am not a transcendental idealist, if anything, it seems you are positing a kind of natural idealism. When I refer to the mediation of thought, I am not referring to supernaturalism, if anything I am referring to criticism, most specifically negative dialectics. This is a continuing process not some Platonic finality. Thought can and does correct the chaos of the natural order.
Quoting apokrisis
This is strange to me, I don't see why you assume that thought is powerless to mediate? We are not talking about a divine intellect, we are talking about human thought. And neither am I saying that Hierarchy Theory is false, valueless or incapable of mediation. I am trying to ask critical questions against what I perceive to be a kind dogmatism, possibly even a naivety that has to do with an idealized version of nature.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, this is a metaphysics that I am calling into question. There is a non-transparent interpretation taking place here which seems to project itself as a finality. Where you say, accept the fact of self-organizing-logic, I see the potential for tyranny. I am trying to analyze it to see if this is the case. Like Adorno, I believe the highest duty of philosophy is to prevent things like Auschwitz from ever happening.
Quoting apokrisis
You have already mentioned the foundation in this sense, physics and psychology. Of course, everything is out of our control in terms of the universe, but not in terms of our own provincialism. Marx understood that freedom was a product of determining the order of systems. In other words, one attempts to control the levers of determinism. One becomes conscious of how individuals are shaped by systems, one then tries to construct qualitative systems. I'm guessing we agree on this point, and by God, what other option do we have?
Quoting apokrisis
You are one of the most intelligent thinkers I have discoursed with on this Forum, and because of this I would not rule out what you say here.
Quoting apokrisis
Man is nature, nature is man. Again, I am not referring to mysticism, just the power of thought. History proves that progress can be made... of course, we are now tumbling into a kind of black hole insofar as the future is concerned. Knowing how to proceed at this stage of existential awareness is a most interesting and urgent question. I for one just can't resign myself to hedonism.
And in what evolutionary context exactly? Let's have a little more precision in our arguments.
Quoting JerseyFlight
The easily available anthropological examination of where "cannibalism" appears in nature as a functional behaviour.
If you want to argue it isn't nature organising itself, what you are missing is the effort you would need to make to get acquainted with the evidence. Dispute that first, talk about your beliefs after.
Quoting JerseyFlight
You are arguing against a position you don't yet understand - by your own admission.
And why should I worry about dragging you kicking and screaming to your conversion? What's in it for me?
Quoting JerseyFlight
You think you aren't and yet the argument you make is. I'm just pointing up that contradiction.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Yep. The pan-semiotic kind.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Why ask a question when you have already assembled your reasons to never believe?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Of course. The facts have to be twisted to fit your prejudices. You make that clear in every response.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Argument by virtue signalling. Seems legit.
Quoting JerseyFlight
The Universe has a flow. As organisms, we are embedded in that flow. To the degree we don't question the impact of that, we will unthinkingly get carried along by that flow. All that is agreed.
The question then is what we will actually think about the situation once we realise we are entrained by it? That is where the "philosophy" can start.
And the answer probably isn't "nature is bad".
However my point remains - how could one even address this question unless one has a crystal clear understanding of Nature as it actually is?
Hierarchy theory - as the basic structuralist model of complex reality - is the way to arrive at that understanding. It's inherent organicism stands opposed to both a mechanical conception of nature, and a spiritual one.
Hierarchies are triadic structures. The systems science story. The step that leads on to a semiotic conception of nature. It accounts for complexity in terms of self-organising immanence.
So that makes it a self-consistent metaphysics. It is its own tradition in the history of ideas.
And what it stands against is the monism of a mechanical view of nature - a place where only a dumb atomistic simplicity is considered as real. There just is no such thing as final cause. That would be an "unscientific" delusion.
It likewise stands against the dualistic tradition we find from Plato to Descartes. The mechanical view can't explain how an orderly world could get created. The idealist instead take the creating mind for granted. There is final cause, but it comes from outside of creation.
So it boils down to a choice between three broad metaphysical alternatives. Hierarchy theory is part of the way that science can assert the natural philosophy point of view.
It is the way that the dialectic of the material and the ideal can be properly fused into the one larger story.
If you think "hierarchy theory" is all about hierarchical organisation gone bad, then you are likely thinking of machine-like situations in human history and not of Nature itself.
Study hierarchy theory and you will see that this mechanical conception of Nature is precisely what it critiques. It has a model of what "bad" looks like. It talks of machines as brittle and senescent - overly constrained and lacking in adaptive intelligence.
Isn't the global Internet a perfectly obvious counterexample?
Of course the Domain Name System (DNS) is hierarchical, but the Internet would work fine without it, if less conveniently. The Backbone system is an engineering hierarchy that makes the system more efficient, but again it's not necessary to the functioning of the Internet. The Internet itself is peer-to-peer and even its basic design and protocols are public and developed through collaborative technical proposals called RFCs, with no central authority. There is no central authority on the Internet.
The internet is hierarchical in its hardware design - https://www.hierarchystructure.com/internets-hierarchical-structure/
But much more interestingly, it is hierarchical in the fashion of a scalefree network. It exhibits the natural fractal or powerlaw behaviour of any freely branching "far from equilbrium" system.
Two observations. First, the salient feature of a hierarchy is that one element is superior to every other element; but there are complex and self-organising structures in which this is not the case; edit: and these are not hierarchical. Second, that we can form hierarchies does not imply that we ought form hierarchies.
That article uses the word hierarchical incorrectly and fails to back up its incorrect assertion; in fact, it perfectly well describes the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet as implemented via the TCP/IP protocol suite. TCP/IP is a pure software specification and does not specify any particular hardware implementation. I did mention the Backbone network in order to get ahead of this particular objection regarding the engineering aspects of the Internet, as opposed to its essential nature as a pure peer-to-peer network. I distinguish the essential and original design of the Internet from its current implementation, which does have hierarchical features: namely the DNS system and the Backbone networks.
So it's a salient feature unless it's not? Well, that clears up any confusion I guess.
Quoting Banno
The question is about nature and why it does in fact organise itself hierarchically - the logical inevitability of that.
The implied conclusion, which I thought obvious, italicises for you.
So the peer-to-peer is implemented at a software level ... not the hardware level? And the article was about the hardware level.
And then at the software level - given a carefully-levelled playing field - we find, as I said, a scalefree network structure emerging?
One with a fat tail distribution of connectivity? One where no designing hand was involved and yet a hierarchical distribution of "significance" was formed? We see agglomeration and disintermediation as the signature of the dynamics?
Quoting apokrisis
Always? Everywhere? Everywhen?
Sounds legit. Did you want that lack of hierarchical order computer generated or nature generated?....
Bleeding Hofstadter. You really need to read some other book on the subject.
Yes. TCP/IP is a pure software networking protocol. It's independent of any particular hardware implementation. As you may know, every single Internet packet includes the source address and the final destination address. The routing is entirely up to the network. All Internet communication is essentially peer-to-peer. No packet has any idea how it will be routed. It only knows its ultimate destination. This is very basic technical information about how the 'net works.
Quoting apokrisis
We have huge telecommunication companies so it's no surprise that the current hardware implementation is hierarchical, as I mentioned in my initial post -- precisely to avoid this objection. How the Internet happens to be implemented is separate from its essential peer-to-peer nature. See for example Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, the standard text on the subject.
https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Comer-Internetworking-with-TCP-IP-Volume-One-6th-Edition/PGM138190.html
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see that at all, except as a byproduct of the contingent hardware implementation. One could in theory imagine a fully-connected graph of nodes, in which AT&T and the other monster telcos would not have a death grip on human communication. One could argue that this is exactly the vision the original Internet developers had in mind. One wouldn't have to argue too strenuously, since they explicitly intended a pure peer-to-peer network.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, this is a byproduct of the contingent hardware implementation resulting from the existing hierarchical structure of huge telecommunication companies. It's neither required by the fundamental protocols nor is it necessary to the functioning of the Internet. One could argue compellingly that it's become counter to the original intent of the Internet.
Quoting apokrisis
Only because the telecommunications behemoths already existed and got their (grubby) hands on it; to the detriment of the original open and free aims intended by the original academic designers.
Perhaps you are arguing that the original Internet designers were naive academics and should have seen it all coming. Or perhaps since the original Arpanet was funded by the government, the naive academics were tools and their vision of unfettered open communications among all humanity was a delusion. You'd have a point, based on how things turned out.
What exception did you have in mind?
It seems to me that your reply is made up of many reductions and mischaracterizations, but it also contains substance. I have learned from reading your posts and often appreciate your compacted style.
Where you accuse me of dogmatism I must deny the charge. Instead of actually engaging some of my objections you classify them in a negative light.
When I said, 'Where you say, accept the fact of self-organizing-logic, I see the potential for tyranny.'
Your reply here was not only condescending, but fallacious: "Of course. The facts have to be twisted to fit your prejudices. You make that clear in every response."
Not at all. I am open to this, but I am wisely contesting its authority. It is a tremendously authoritative claim.
When someone starts talking about accepting self-organizing logic, they are going to bear the burden of proof.
When I said, 'Like Adorno, I believe the highest duty of philosophy is to prevent things like Auschwitz from ever happening.'
Your reply is another false framing of my position:
"Argument by virtue signalling. Seems legit."
The reason I address this is because my position on the purpose and duty of philosophy is more important to me than this entire conversation. You make it sound like I am trying to enlist some technique of rhetoric here. This is not the case. This was Adorno's position and it is also mine. I do not believe the duty of philosophy is to play abstract games, but use thought to affect reality in a positive way. Philosophy has no higher duty or purpose than to enlist itself against social horrors like Auschwitz or the Soviet Union. "The whole point of philosophy," said Adorno, "was to make sure that nothing like Auschwitz ever happens again." He was correct. I stand by it and will defend it.
That sort of thing.
Thanks. I'm quite familiar with all that. I was around when IBM was pushing LU6.2.
I read @JerseyFlight as asking more than just a question about physics; hence mention of quality and value. Ought as well as is.
Ok. Then you must agree with my point that the software protocols are peer-to-peer and the opposite of hierarchical. And I concede your point that the present hardware infrastructure is hierarchical.
One still must draw a distinction between a rigid communication hierarchy, in which A talks to B who talks to C in order to communicate with D; and a peer-to-peer network, in which any node can freely communicate with any other. It's a matter of which level you view it from I suppose. You agree at least with this much.
Ah .... explains a lot. SNA is a hierarchical network. Your formative conception of networking is hierarchical. If you'd come to TCP/IP first (as I did) your philosophical understanding of networking might be different. TCP/IP is the exact opposite of SNA. Hierarchical networking failed (at the software level) and peer-to-peer took over the world. Of course from a practical level I suppose hardware is inherently hierarchical, since network traffic must be aggregated at each level. Is this the emergent hierarchy you're talking about? Still, conceptually, TCP/IP is peer-to-peer. I hope you'll work extra hard to overcome your SNA bias here.
So a BZ pattern for instance....
Am I being too subtle?
The hardware was hierarchical because that's just the naturally efficient way to organise the world so it can handle a traffic of data.
Then the software was the attempt to create a new flat virtual realm on top - a unstructured network.
And yet once this software started to handle real world activity, it then developed a hierarchical pattern of activity. As again, that just is what is natural. The flat network became a hierarchical network of networks, with some networks much bigger than most of the others.
Check out constructal theory for the generality it this.
You keep failing to substantiate your "criticisms".
What do you mean by "tyranny" exactly? Where is the evidence that cannibalism lacks evolutionary context? Why is preventing another Holocaust something to be loaded on the shoulders of hierarchy theory?
It is one rhetorical response after another from you. I'm am waiting for some reply with substance.
Well, no; as I said, a hierarchy is characterised by one element that is superior to every other element. Superior is not an ideal word here - perhaps privileged?
Neither the production of bromine, nor its consumption, is privileged in the reaction.
I think your IBM/SNA background gave you a certain worldview. It's a different reality than the packet-switching approach of TCP/IP. Funny that it's influenced your understanding of philosophy.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm going to concede this point. Even if the AT&T's of the world didn't exist we'd have to invent them. Local aggregation will layer its way up to form a hierarchy, as you say.
Quoting apokrisis
Ok then we are in agreement. The original aim was anti-hierarchical, even if it didn't quite work out. Must that necessarily be the case? Perhaps, and if so I'd need to concede the software point too. Just as utopian human communities always fail. Equality only works in theory; and in the end you always have lords and serfs.
Quoting apokrisis
So it was all inevitable, and not an awful contingent perversion of the original idea. You're probably right. The utopian vision of the Internet failed; and it wasn't an accident or a plot of the telcos and the government; but rather some sort of structural law of nature in favor of hierarchies, if I can put it that way.
But then you'd say that SNA is a limiting case of TCP/IP; and that, I can't agree with. The TCP/IP packets don't know and don't care how they get where they're going; and surely there's something essential in that.
Quoting apokrisis
Found a couple of interesting references. I see the point you're making. In the end, the packets have to organize themselves into hierarchical flows no matter how utopian the original intent.
In hierarchy theory, it is about global constraints imposed on local degrees of freedom. And in self-organisation, both of those things emerge in mutually dependent fashion.
You're talking about some unscientific caricature - a layman's misunderstanding of the subject being discussed.
It is the same as the wealth inequality story. We can't accuse neoliberalism of having a malign intent. It is just a fact of exponential growth that it shifts you from a Gaussian distribution into a Powerlaw regime. Creating a flat market with unbounded growth had to result in new extremes of inequality ... just because randomness and the Matthew effect.
Right, same reason utopian communities always fail. In the end, lords and serfs is a law of nature. How depressing. I think you made your point. It's not all an evil plot. It's an engineering principle of how things flow. Still ... discovering that your worldview comes from IBM mainframes explains a lot :-)
Ah, am I? Doubtless. However the phrase "global constraints imposed on local degrees of freedom" seems to be somewhat localised to your posts, so we might see what @JerseyFlight thinks.
This is exactly what I was getting it. I don't see how my criticisms of Hierarchy Theory fall flat when the whole point was that people like yourself would end up saying things exactly like this: "one cannot classify it in the negative because we observe it as a part of a natural system." If this is the case, and I am not taking you out of context, I don't only reject what you say, but note that it is refuted all the time by human mediation. It would seem the conclusion is not that we need a Hierarchy Theory, but a theory of mediation.
Sure. Don’t bother with the science. Sounds like a plan.
'The question I have for hierarchy theorists is how the structuring of such a system avoids the arbitrary negation or deprivation of potentially valuable parts that have been deemed at a lower level of value?'
Come on friend, you gave an analogy of soldiers and generals. And now you confess to "imposed constraints on freedom."
What is most dangerous as I see it, and it is no surprise to me that you cannot see it, is this idea of natural order. Because this is how the constraints would no doubt be justified. You will claim that these are natural, thus normative. This creates a category beyond criticism.
Science is important, but we are human life and human life must be protected, even from science.
I can imagine my analysis here is, if not frustrating, at least disappointing for you, because you are totally correct, this is just a layman criticism of the position, and quite frankly, you are vastly smarter than me. Because of this I would like to make clear that I do not think these objections are somehow comprehensive to your position. I never meant them to be that, I always meant them to be preliminary questions. I was hoping that many of us would explore this emerging field together, not dogmatically but openly. Even now I am simply trying to understand. My position is not dogmatic but one that is open to learn.
It definitely doesn’t. Although now you mention it, IBM did push the 80:20 rule as a primitive expression of the powerlaw story.
I actually did edit an IBM mainframe journal for a couple of years so interviewed guys like Gene Amdahl and Bill Gates. It was right at the time that IBM was losing the battle to impose its proprietary hierarchical SNA cooperative processing architecture on the data processing world.
Cool experiences. And now, I have to reframe my understanding of that history. Are you saying that in the end, hierarchies won again? That TCP/IP in effect turned into SNA? That they built an open system but it inevitably turned into a hierarchical one? So they might as well not have bothered? Ok that's clearly not true. So it brings up the question: What did the open peer-to-peer idea bring to the table, in somehow augmenting or improving the hierarchy? Does your theory account for the fact that a hierarchical hardware layer with a peer-to-peer software layer seems to be the winning ticket?
Of course IBM would have loved to have controlled the world's networking standards ... TCP/IP foiled that dream. Will you agree that there is something, even if I'm not nailing it yet, non-hierarchical about the Internet, even today? And that it's an important component?
TCP/IP says that any hardware whatsoever that adhered to publicly published protocols, could participate. In fact you could write your own commentary on the protocols, improvements, new protocols. Any kind of hardware at all. And you don't have to know anything about the network. you just need the address of your destination and the network delivers it. And no one part of the network has to know all the routing. Each node only knows where to send each packet next, and the network itself dynamically adjusts its routing tables as new nodes appear or leave.
All that was a profound advance in networking and it did take over the world. I contend that Its openness was a crucial aspect of its market victory.
There is something to that. I am sort of coming around to my original position. The non-hierarchical nature of the software at its core, has to be acknowledged. You can't just say it's a hierarchy because that's how the packets flow. It's a lot different than a pure hierarchical network.
Does you theory accommodate this situation?
ps -- It's the dynamic routing. A hierarchical network has to do all the routing at the top. It can't compete with dynamic peer-to-peer routing. So at the software level. the Internet works because it is essentially anti-hierarchical. No one node knows the network. No one node controls the network.
I have convinced myself my original point was right. That's a different position from where I was when I started this post so nothing's set in stone. But you have to acknowledge the importance of anti-hierarchy. The Internet's hardware layer is hierarchical; and the software is anti-hierarchical or peer-to-peer. Yeah there are big routers in the middle but they don't control things, they just keep track of their own local sphere of knowledge.
My point was that IBM was trying to preserve the world it knew, which was still a pretty small world. It owned the data processing market with it 370 architecture and its networks of dumb terminals. With minis and then PCs intruding on its monopoly, it wanted to shift to a “seamless” data world, but one still locked into its closed software standards.
But then came the open internet and open standards. Data processing morphed from business computing and eventually into phone driven social media.
So yes, hierarchies will always emerge as the natural way to organise flows - entropic or informational. But if IBM had managed to stay in control, then you would have been stuck with corporate information systems and not evolved to those new levels of information flow.
Another wrinkle of hierarchy theory is it predicts the simplification of its own foundations, constraints shape the degrees of freedom. And evolution moves in the direction of ever greater openness for that reason. It produces general purpose components that enable the shift to higher levels of complexity.
Virtual machines created a considerable increase in software load the hardware has to support. So it is quite a penalty overhead to add the flat world of peer to peer connectivity as an example. Yet that then allows another leap upwards in terms of the functional capacity of the architecture. It soon pays for itself if it leads to a world of increased information flow.
Or at least humans will be happy to pay the data centre electricity bills.
Your post overlapped my edits, I'll try to respond and hope you're rereading the last part of my post. I better leave this for tomorrow. FWIW I came up in the microcomputer business at around that time. So my origin is very "anti-IBM" which perhaps also explains a lot. IBMers wore suits, we had beer busts. And packet-switched networking.
Quoting apokrisis
Hence the evolutionary advantage of non-hierarchical systems! You are talking me back into my original point!
Ok time for bed.
Is that more dangerous then folk invoking supernatural order?
And did you miss the bit where I said if you understand natural order, then you can actually answer the question of what else could you be doing?
So my point about fossil fuel economics is that it is a Hegelian force that has pushed us into our current economic and political paradigm. Oil produced neoliberalism as its way to achieve its goal.
But how can you even see that is what happened if you don’t understand the way nature works?
I'm certainly not sure your quantum Hegelianism is entirely as scientific as you would have us believe.
Quoting JerseyFlight
'Twas ever the province of the Dialectic to tell us that one normative system or the other was inevitable. I'm thinking that is an idiosyncratic addition to Hierarchy Theory; but further, I'd be interested to hear why hierarchies might have a preferred place to other structures. My suspicion is that hierarchies are relatively simple and hence one might start a theory of structure there, but that is a long way form the claim that they are inevitable. So Herbert A. Simon's analysis is a start, not the end. The move would not be dissimilar to that described by @fishfry from hierarchic networks to peer-to-peer.
But being an old Hippie, versed in E. F. Schumacher and Bill Mollison, that's just the sort of thing I would say.
The advantage was removing the real world physical limitations on open connectivity. The internet created a world of pure information flows where the cost of connecting was zeroed to some ISP rate. Physical distance, hardware configuration, and anything else that could physical constrain an act of communication were removed to produce a level playing field.
So it had nothing to do with going non-hierarchical and everything to do with creating a new virtual stage where the information was divorced from the physics.
People let rip in this new world. And as is natural, hierarchical order resulted. We ended up with the influencer economy, Trump, cancel culture, and all those other good things.
It is always concerning to see empirical observation and science challenged by ideology. I think you are absolutely on the right side of this debate. I wanted to ask you a question. Do you think moderating how the hierarchy functions insofar as how it is enforced, who rises upward, the power granted to each ring and so on, is the best way to avoid negative outcomes? I think that this is where progress has been and can be made and how we stop hierarchies from being too tyrannical.
It could be more dangerous depending on how the natural order is interpreted.
Quoting apokrisis
It seems to me the latter premise is here conditioned by the first.
Quoting apokrisis
This question assumes that you have rightly understood Neoliberalism at its most hierarchical and primitive base. Because you have understood it through hierarchy theory? You specifically said that "oil produced it," what about ideology, what about psychology, what about class structure?
I think Banno is asking important questions here: "I'd be interested to hear why hierarchies might have a preferred place to other structures. My suspicion is that hierarchies are relatively simple and hence one might start a theory of structure there, but that is a long way form the claim that they are inevitable."
Where does this theory lead in terms of political power? You have already made statements to the effect that tyranny "is just a fact." Can you say for sure that it doesn't lead here:
[b]Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World
by Daniel A. Bell, Wang Pei[/b]
[i]A trenchant defense of hierarchy in different spheres of our lives, from the personal to the political
All complex and large-scale societies are organized along certain hierarchies, but the concept of hierarchy has become almost taboo in the modern world. Just Hierarchy contends that this stigma is a mistake. In fact, as Daniel Bell and Wang Pei show, it is neither possible nor advisable to do away with social hierarchies. Drawing their arguments from Chinese thought and culture as well as other philosophies and traditions, Bell and Wang ask which forms of hierarchy are justified and how these can serve morally desirable goals. They look at ways of promoting just forms of hierarchy while minimizing the influence of unjust ones, such as those based on race, sex, or caste.
Which hierarchical relations are morally justified and why? Bell and Wang argue that it depends on the nature of the social relation and context. Different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations: what justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens, countries, humans and animals, and humans and intelligent machines. Morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives, though these will be very different from the unjust hierarchies that have governed us in the past.
A vigorous, systematic defense of hierarchy in the modern world, Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.[/i]
What about human rights?
I would have thought that attaching Hegelian dialectic to thermodynamics was exactly science challenged by ideology.
A hierarchy as understood in an organic systems sense, and not just a mechanistic construction sense, is a natural balance of complementary impulses. That is why it is self organising and self balancing.
So a social system would be trying to balance the contrasting things of local competition and global cooperation.
The hierarchy would be driven by the creative freedoms of individuals, and even groups of individuals, striving to better their positions (in whatever ways - money, status, power, reproductive success, happiness, self actualisation).
But this would be matched by some equal degree of cooperativity. Individuals and even groups of individuals, would do the opposite thing of competing hard. They would cooperate hard, because that is also an ultimately functional and self-interested thing to be doing when life is dependent on their being a collective functional social system.
It you want the status of being even an adequate tennis player, you have to support the existence of a tennis club and a game being played by shared rules. Cooperation on a general global level sets the scene such that you can actually express a competitive nature on the local and personal scale.
The same goes for any social function. Democracy is where we all agree to being bound by a collective rule of law that in turn clearly defines our individual rights and freedoms. That sets us up to compete in ways that - if they are functional - will rebuild, even grow, the very society that constrains us.
So our societies make us what we are by placing limits on our actions. And if those limits are well adapted, then we will spend our lives expressing the resulting habits of action in ways that bring personal achievement while confirming those same rules of engagement.
When we talk about negative outcomes, we are usually thinking of some idealised utopian view of the human condition, Maybe Rousseau’s noble savage, or the happy village before the dark satanic mills appeared. Competition and status seeking are modern distortions of what is best in humans - the cheerful commune where all are equal and help themselves to the common wealth as fits their needs.
Negativity is where a social order is authoritarian and suppressive of individuals freedoms. Things are unbalanced where one isn’t in fact free to compete according to a shared framework and so contribute fully to the functioning whole.
And negativity is also about the question of whether the whole system is aimed at a functional direction. What’s the point of the human rat race? Who benefits?
So there are plenty of ways the balancing act could go wrong. But there is still the naturalness, the logical inevitably, of a hierarchical relationship based on some systematised balance of local striving competition and globally constraining cooperativity.
If any social order persists for long, it can only have persisted because it did in fact strike some kind of balance in terms of being able to turn out individuals who then remade the social world as it had made them.
From a modern point of view, we would say that traditional social hierarchies were rather stagnant in character and lacked energetic growth. And yet they were functional for lives lived either as sparse populations of hunter gatherers, or denser populations of agrarian settlements - lives lived within the physical limits of solar energy.
And today we live lives as optimised to dissipate the energy bonanza that is fossil fuels. We have evolved the social settings which promote unbound growth. That’s a positive - or at least natural - for as long as it lasts.
But the main point here is that social structure is a dynamical balance. And that balancing act - in which global constraints need to produce the right kinds of local degrees of freedom to ensure the whole gets persistently rebuilt - is the guts of what hierarchy theory is describing.
Not Hegel but Peirce. And Peirce was a scientist. His orientation was probabilistic and thus thermodynamic.
I think that you would have to trample on those to destroy hierarchies? If that is what free choice creates.
I am far less interested in where you think your plans might take you, I'm more interested to hear your plans. Provided the focus is on hierarchies, I think things will be unclear. I think any sensible proposal to dismantle a hierarchy will require an element of tyranny greater than what was present in the actual hierarchy.
Quoting apokrisis
Ah, my bad...?
Does Nature have a choice to be other than self organising? Well only if we start appealing to some divine creator.
Does Nature have a choice to be other than functional? Well only if we are not interested in forms of being that enjoy a capacity to persist as anything.
Does Nature have a choice to be other than hierarchically organised? Well dialectics tells us that the simplest model of a balanced structure is a complementary deal between global constraints and local degrees of freedom.
If you have some other model of self organising, persisting, functional structure, now would be the time to present it.
Have you read Peirce?
It might be helpful to talk about this in the language that network theory has created for itself.
So your peer-to-peer revolution created a flat landscape - a new world in which making an informational connection carried a uniform costs, regardless of the underlying hardware physics.
But then that flat landscape got colonised in a free or locally unconstrained way. Everyone got busy on the internet in ways that freely expressed their own functional(?) human interest.
Connections were added and a hierarchical structure resulted because of the Matthew Effect or preferential attachment. Hubs and fat tails became a thing.
A "flat" network would have had a Gaussian randomness in its connectivity - everyone would have connected to the same average degree. That is what net equality would have looked like.
But as a freely growing beast, the internet instead developed hierarchical complexity. It developed the different statistical pattern of scale invariance. It became fractally organised so that now scales of being were themselves "equalised" in that there was no one standard mean. Connectivity was powerlaw and hubs of any size could manifest.
Porn could dominate the internet. And philosophy forums could live alongside just as freely as the tiniest scales of interest communities.
Well, on technical point, the internet is probably more log/normal as a distribution and not quite making the giddy heights of a log/log distribution. Just like the stock market or most other real world systems.
So the Gaussian and Powerlaw models of "randomness" are a dialectic that frame the ideal extremes of self-organisation. Reality falls in-between the two, depending on how constrained or unconstrained the connectivity happens to be.
But the point is that hierarchies of connectivity emerge naturally as the structures that dissipate flows. And this is dialectical in the sense that either the flow tends towards the closed Gaussian equilibrium balance, or towards the exponentially growing Powerlaw equilibrium balance.
A Gaussian hierarchy is canonically simple. It is a single scale system because it has a single mean. Like an ideal gas, it has a stable temperature and pressure - even as all the gas particles ricochet about with statistical freedom. There are no internal scales of difference - gangs of particles that dominate. Everything is as average as possible. Internally there are no differences that make a difference, even if every particle is expressing some different momentum.
Then a Powerlaw system would be at the other extreme. As Universality describes, as you start to disrupt the stable Gaussian equilibrium of some flow by heating it up, it start to form internal structure.
You get the dialectical patterning that Banno stumbled upon when he hastily googled "What is self organisation"...
Quoting Banno
If an equilibrium balance is disturbed by an injection of energy, then it starts to oscillate. The system depends on some dissipative balance of reaction~diffusion and suddenly it is having to absorb more energy than it can immediately handle. It becomes like the straight river that begins to carve out a snaking channel. If the river can't drain faster, it can add dissipative capacity by becoming longer. And so it does.
But keep adding energy and there is a transition to chaos - a Powerlaw regime. Dissipative features - oscillations, turbulence, etc - start to appear on all scales as ways to absorb the increasing throughput. You again have a scalefree hierarchy of structure being expressed on every possible scale to cope with the demand. You arrive at an ecosystem level of complexity in biological terms.
So the patterns of nature take these forms. You have the highly Gaussian pole of being where the hierarchy is just a simple stable bounded system with no internal structure.
In human terms, we might be thinking of ideals like a hunter gatherer tribe or a Masonic lodge - a group with a stable common identity and no internal divisions. (Of course, no actual tribe or lodge is ideal as stuff is always happening to disrupt the "energy").
Then at the other extreme of being, you have the crazy chaos of the stock market or the internet. You have some essential dialectic - such as reaction~diffusion - being expressed over all possible scales of being. Internally, the number of hierarchical levels tends towards the infinite.
In terms of wealth vs poverty, or fame vs anonymity, these social systems have such diversity of outcomes that anything is possible in either direction. Life isn't homogenous as it is with a static hierarchical order - a single scale of local~global interaction, a single deal when it comes to the exchange between competitive and cooperative behaviours. It is instead as inhomogenous as could be imagined .... and yet still a stable, natural, functional, outcome in terms of producing the maximum dissipative flow that its structure can support.
Chaos as a dialectic expressed freely over infinite scale is also a hierarchical state of order.
And then - because we have these two ideal limit descriptions of hierarchical order - we also have all the intermediate states that are somewhere in between. We have the log/normal conditions where there is a fair bit of hubbing, but a fair bit of egalatarianism too. And this might be a functional balance for dealing with the available entropic throughput - doing the actual job of the system.
Not every river has to be a sluggish canal or a wild fractal delta. Plenty are carving out snaking loops across the landscape as an intermediate form of hierarchical architecture.
And here endeth another science lesson on how it all connects up. :grin:
How do you know that it's not the other way around? If you simply read over this thread you will see admissions from apokrisis that go exactly in this direction.
Has Banno actually read Simon? He contributed an excellent chapter to the 1973 classic edited by Howard Pattee - Hierarchy Theory: The Challenge of Complex Systems.
And this wiki entry sums it up....
A lack of scholarship is one thing. A wilful ignorance being displayed while also citing said scholarship is taking it to another level, dontcha think? :chin:
Instead of making hopeful sounds that people have no choice but to agree with you, why not make a considered argument.
For example, why did Marxist ideals wind up in the tyrannies imposed by Stalin and Mao? What went on there exactly?
Then why did those tyrannies collapse for a while only to be re-imposed (to some degree) by Putin and Xi?
The real world offers you interesting examples in terms of what you claim to be your area of interest. Yet you won't engage in such specifics.
??? Not following here. Some of the objections I have raised in the course of this thread have been validated, your response was simply to minimize them, or assert that there is no other option. My entire discourse has been directed at potential tyranny. I even cited a book that was just recently published, and while this text is not about Hierarchy Theory in terms of biology, the questioned I asked you was valid, are you sure that Hierarchy Theory will not end up going in this direction? We are talking "about global constraints imposed on local degrees of freedom," enshrined as a normative political philosophy. I would argue that this matters far more than the fundamentalism of your academic theory.
@apokrisis claims that hierarchies are inevitable.
@fishfry, @JerseyFlight and I don't agree. Not all complex systems are hierarchies.
Further, Apo says that it is science that backs his claim, while mixing in Hegel and Peirce. That's not just science; that's science with an ideological spin.
But of more philosophical interest is the incipient denial of human autonomy, which is perhaps the core issue raised in the OP.
I agree with this, so I will just say, I agree with you. This is also a serious objection against Hierarchy Theory, which so far as I know, has not been addressed. Why isolate the hierarchical example? Further, this proves my point about mediation. If we are choosing between complex systems, as well as interpreting, thought is already mediating. So if there is any real hierarchy here it must be thought itself, which sits at the foundation of all this predication.
So when hierarchies go bad? Or "all hierarchy is bad"?
Which claim do you mean to defend?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Your questions are mind-numbingly monotonic.
I've tried to give you a baseline description of hierarchies as the natural, logically inevitable, expression of functional organisation.
I've emphasised the way that this is a balancing act in terms I thought you might best understand - the Hegelian dialectic.
And so it should have sunk in by now that an organisation that is self-organised to achieve a dialectical balance could also fail to achieve that balance - and thus be ripe for evolutionary recycling.
If tyrannies (however you define that term, you are not saying) can persist, then hierarchy theory would demand that they have found some way to repair and reproduce their own fabric.
We could examine that and decide - from some other viewpoint - that it isn't ideal.
In a dictatorship, or a slave based society, there will be some folk who think that is a great deal. Yet clearly, there are tensions built into "what works". And over time we would expect those tensions manifest in ways that force change and achieve some better overall balance for the whole of that society.
So self-organising is self-correcting. Evolution does its job in good time. And if we understand the way it works - as we definitely started to with the Enlightenment and its inquiry into the nature of society - then we can even nudge things along to that broader state of global cohesion and individual contribution.
But to hear you bleat on about "hierarchies are the slippery slope to tyranny" is just painful to listen to. It's not my idea of a discussion of the realities.
Agreed. Even simple systems are as well. :up:
Your problem is that you don't even recognise when your examples of non-hierarchical systems are examples of hierarchical systems. That is what happens when google leads you to source material you can't comprehend.
Quoting Banno
What I actually said was that systems scientists pick out their own metaphysical heroes. So systems scientists set their holism against a reductionist metaphysics by citing Aristotle, and more recently, Peirce.
Hegel individually doesn't get that much of a look in. But Naturphilosophie as the broader strand of German idealism does.
Likewise Heraclitus sort of fits. But Aristotle gave the comprehensive framework.
Again, you are speaking of a whole vein of intellectual history that is above your pay grade. Your every comment reveals that ignorance.
I fancy your expression here.
Quoting apokrisis
The question you are asking me is negated by your metaphysics: "If tyrannies can persist, then hierarchy theory would demand that they have found some way to repair and reproduce their own fabric."
Which is contradicted by:
"It is the same as the wealth inequality story. We can't accuse neoliberalism of having a malign intent. It is just a fact of exponential growth..."
There is real discrepancy here.
If the hierarchy is destructive to potential value, then the reply within the system is simply to say, "we can't accuse... it is just a fact" of nature.
So when you ask me about hierarchies versus hierarchy it is you who have made them the same thing, because by accepting them as normative you are also making the claim that they are socially intelligent standards. Again, category immune from criticism. My objection is that just because we see it in nature doesn't make it a wise procedure for humans to adopt.
Quoting apokrisis
Not if the hierarchy stacks the system against such change to achieve its functional form.
Quoting apokrisis
This is not exactly my position, but it is the direction of my questions. I did cite a book that uses this concept for exactly this purpose.
I am not disputing that hierarchies can be tyrannical or don't have elements of tyranny in them. Honestly, I think this is an ideological angle but let's say it isn't, we should approach this problem from the initial question of: does the empirical evidence put the science in a category beyond criticism? Secondly, if yes, then what does that extend to? The inevitability of hierarchies, yes but what about their functions and structure? And third, if no, then are hierarchies bad and/or is there a better alternative?
Sadly, I think the correct answer to the first question is yes, the empirical evidence does put the science in a category beyond criticism. Thus I am interested in the second question, what is not beyond criticism and what can be maximised for things of the nature of human rights.
I am not surprised to see this debate, I would've been shocked to see you also answer yes, I see your views about "human thought" as being mostly an extreme take on the nature vs nurture debate. You are the most nurture-orientated thinker I've ever seen. I pretty much lost interest when I read your debate vs Carlos.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Quoting JerseyFlight
The evidence for how looks orientated humans are, is far more overwhelming than the proof for the inevitability of hierarchies. The only actual chance you have here, to destroy this particular hierarchy is to impose rules that constitute the absolute greatest degree of tyranny. I think when you reject reality to this extent, posit the power of human thought to change it in any which way, it becomes a moral issue of "well, why don't we?". It is this very moral conundrum which is being rejected.
Quoting apokrisis
I would like to go back to your example of the Roman army, because one might point out the similarities and differences between discipline there and in the modern army. For example, a restriction on behaviour for the purpose of discipline is necessary but the punishment for that in the Roman army might be execution or lashing, while in a modern army, the measures taken are substantially less severe. I think we could all agree that it is preferable to have the later approach though both undeniably function. Tyranny may become an issue where the Roman general has the complete authority to execute a soldier for a minor offence, whereas the authority of the modern general is far more constrained. I think even if the Roman method was superior in some ways, though I'm not claiming it is, we would still prefer to see the methods of the modern army because we place a high-value on human freedom and life.
It seems we have the ability to impose constraints on behaviours which don't merely sabotage the effectiveness of the hierarchy but also on those that result in infringements upon human rights or our ideas about fairness. To what extent is it practical for us to think that we can introduce such restrictions due the concerns we might have about hierarchies? I am really interested in what is unrealistic for us to try to manufacture and what we should be able to do to make society as fair and pleasant as possible. What parts of the hierarchical system can't be touched?
So in what technical sense is neoliberalism a tyranny?
I'm not saying that such an argument couldn't be made. But I'm asking you to make it.
Quoting JerseyFlight
You have a wild misreading of my ethical conclusions. In general, I don't find being either merely descriptive, nor rigidly normative, a dialectic that works for Natural Philosophy. The whole is~ought debate is a great pain in the arse.
A systems answer instead focuses on the reality that to exist, a system has to be - in some proper sense - functional. So that brings finality into play. A purpose is being served, even if it is merely "to exist".
But then grades of finality are also then recognised. The base grade for nature is the Laws of Thermodynamics. They are normative to the degree they allow no other physical choice. And they are positive as a brute description of what is (unless you want to argue some other cosmology).
But that cosmic grade of telos is a mere physical tendency. It ain't that restrictive. In fact it leaves almost everything to chance. Our major complaint about the Cosmos is that it seems meaningless and uncaring. It is happy being filled with entropy and randomness. It seems the opposite of a tyranny in being an anarchy, I guess. :razz:
Beyond the physico-chemical grade of telos as "tendency", things start to get interesting with living and mindful systems. Now they are driven by "functional" goals.
Then we start to get purpose proper with human language and culture. We can move beyond the merely functional and towards the intentional as - so we like to claim - a physically dissociated level of free choice. The dilemma of freewill and moral imperative is - idealistically - invented.
So my ethical framework is the one that encompasses the usual dialectic of is~ought and reveals its many grades of semiosis, its various levels of hierarchical constraint on individual freedom.
It is the richer view from a natural science perspective. Or the overly complex view, from a layperson's perspective.
In my first example, I in fact had the modern army in mind. And then I mentioned the Greek hoplites as military histories like Carnage focus on the way that the social democracy of the Greeks was the reason they could self-organise in far more effective fashion as a fighting force.
Quoting Judaka
The Roman army at least handed out punishment according to Roman concepts of law. There were rules and their consequences. And the discipline was beneficial when it came time to beat the ten times larger army of a barbarian horde.
If your boss is a Persian satrap, you could be lashed or executed by whim. Or at least your protection would be some kind of social communal level of tolerance. And not much connected with the real business of being a fighter.
But Roman generals were constrained by all sorts of rules. They got appointed. They couldn't bring their troops into the capital. There were all sorts of checks and balances that served the function of making the Roman army the colonising economic machine that it was.
And likewise, the modern professional army has its rules-based democracy which is consciously designed not so that is "good" but so that it is effective at its job. If you are hiring weapon system operators and logistic managers to wage your technological war rather than some random gang of toughs, then you have to start treating them like the white collar workers they are. They have to have soft beds, five choices of dessert, and a wifi connection while they are roughing it against the tribes in Afghanistan.
So what matters here is that the rules frame the freedoms. And the more you invest in small highly trained, highly equipped professionals, the less you want to make them go consider alternative career choices - right before you send them into action where their heads get blown off.
Quoting Judaka
What has actually happened in society? I think we can say that live used to be lived in a very physical way. And the hierarchical organisation of society reflected that.
When I was a kid, you could still strapped on the hand for being cheeky to the teacher. That escalated to a caning at high school. A casual physical brutality was the norm. It was soft to take a tent when you went camping. School dentistry was done without anaesthetic and a slow drill. Nurses were known to do this on wee kids just for practice.
I could go on. But this was only the 1960s and 1970s. Hardly the Stone Age.
Nowadays no human or animal is meant to suffer anything - even the slightest insult to their ego and self-esteem.
Is this inherently better? It is certainly a direction history has taken for some reason. And we can talk about the functional outcomes - analyse them ahead of judging them.
So the big question is why might fairness and happiness seem the highest good? Where does that leave challenge and excitement? Where does that leave the casual freedom of the past? How does it relate to Maslow's hierarchy of needs where "self-actualisation" looks to be what every step leads to?
We have worked so hard as a modern society to remove real world physics as a constraint on our Being. We all laugh at the US military as it can't go anywhere in the world without comfy pillows and Frosty Freeze dispensers.
But in moving our Being into the virtual information reality of the cyberspace, into the temperature controlled environments and snack-filled fridges of our McMansions, into the woke safe zones of our social discourse, have we made some kind of real progress?
I really question that - while agreeing that I more than just about anyone have personally benefited.
So is constraint a problem in itself? Is there anything sacrosanct to be protected in the hierarchical arrangements we create?
My answer has been that constraints are a necessity. Nothing exists unless there is context to give it a shape. And even something to oppose, in the way any organism opposes its own wishes against the vagaries of the world.
So the very idea of a constraint is what entails a "degree of freedom". Constraints simply cause freedoms to become focused in some useful direction.
But the danger for life and mind - as hierarchical systems - lies in not paying sufficient attention to the fact that they are semiotic processes. They are all about information regulating physics (for the purposes of maintaining some balanced and well adapted state of existence).
So you do want to rise above the brute physical world to a pragmatic extent. Comfortable beds can be better than hard ground. But what of the idea of completely transcending the physical realm rather than being more intelligently engaged with it?
Is that where even existing begins to lose its point?
That is the kind of question you can ask of our collective social structure at this point in its evolution. To what degree is it some kind of mad idealist fantasy being spun off the illusory riches of fossil fuels?
Again, for me, modern life is bloody terrific. I'm not complaining personally.
But that is how my understanding of natural systems shapes my critique. If I wanted to put a finger on the lack of balance, it is in things like an economic system based on entropification that fails to account for the costs of its entropic sinks.
So neoliberalism can be fine as a theory. Up until the point it refuses to include the costs of the environment in its market pricing.
Yes, if social hierarchies are inevitable in what sense are they inevitable, in the sense of centralized government, in the sense of dictators? In any case we are mediating with thought, which once again proves my point regarding thought in relation to hierarchies. The value is in the mediation not the mere observation of the hierarchy. The fact that we can stand back and judge them already proves that they are not the highest thing, thought is that.
Quoting Judaka
Exactly how a human-nature-supernaturalist would think. This is false. I made many other points in that exchange, the most significant being that our sense of attraction is instilled by our experience of culture. Whether you like it or not how your brain functions is a matter of your maturation environment, most specifically the development of your attachment system. This is not my mere opinion (see Allan Schore, Right Brain Psychotherapy). You were allowing Carlos' own insecurity to dictate the objective nature of the situation. If you want a better society you have to produce better humans, and if you want to grow better humans you have to give them a better environment and higher quality nutrients. You are nurture. You couldn't even respond to my replies without the right nutrients, the fact that you can even comprehend them simply means you are a beneficiary of society (this is equally true for myself). All your individual quality can be traced directly to your social experience.
Yes, this I consider a compliment. It means I'm not confusing reality with idealism.
I believe in the power of thought too, but not to do the impossible, rather, to control the narrative through arranging truth. To render truth an irrelevance through control over the narrative is a simple thing done by everyone.
Quoting JerseyFlight
What you mean by "functions" here is selective, because indeed, what is included in this "function" you describe? You are excluding a lot, emphasising some portion of the brain's activities.
Quoting JerseyFlight
The burden of proof for characterisations like this, minuscule, but do not think that this applies only for you. To characterise you in unflattering ways is always a possibility for me, to do it to the extent that your ideas don't even have to be contended with, well, I'm sure you've seen that before, you can't be blind to this, can be done by a child.
Quoting JerseyFlight
"Better" this, "better" that. Highly selective, highly characterised, highly narrativized. Your "truth" is personalised, it is a creation of yours, not something which I should accept unless I wish to relinquish all control.
Point of mediation sustained.
Quoting Judaka
Directly refuting your false metaphysical nature model of humans, which is left over from the dark ages: "...the maturation of the emotion-processing limbic circuits of specifically the infant's developing right brain are influenced by implicit intersubjective affective transactions embedded in the attachment relationship with the primary caregiver." Ibid. Allan Schore, Chp.2
I am not typing out more, read the book.
Quoting Judaka
I did engage the fella you are referring to, I did not simply try to refute him by a characterization. My point here is that you are not looking at the issue objectively but allowing this person's feelings of insecurity to dictate the content and emphasis.
Quoting Judaka
No. If you don't eat food and drink water you won't have the energy to reply let alone comprehend. This is not my personalized opinion. Further, it is not good for you or anyone else to have an attachment disturbance, attempting to make contact with the social world through the left side of your brain. This is not just my personalized opinion. Yes, better. If you want a better society you have to have an intelligent social system that lends itself to the objective production of better humans.
The fact that it bolsters corporate hierarchies to the detriment of human potential. Privatizing economic sectors of public service to the disenfranchisement of individuals. Deregulation, austerity. Not sure what you need to know that you don't already know?
Quoting apokrisis
I understand, but here you seem to have no meta-awareness of your concept of functionality. If you read me as saying that your conclusion of function will always be tyranny, this is wrong. My argument has always targeted your notion of existence, which means, your notion of observed [interpreted] hierarchy posited as intelligence. I am not opposed to making use of hierarchy theory, I am arguing against a kind naturalistic, ethical determinism, my alternative is not make-believe phantoms, but simply the mediation of thought.
But it seems to me there may very well be a deeper problem here. What if the whole notion of hierarchy, as I suspect it to be, is a lie, a delusion of the understanding unaided by reason? (This is to speak in Hegelian terms). Let me explain what I mean, what you interpret to be higher, how can this be the case when its existence hinges, just as vitally, on other components? Maybe the picture of hierarchy is a delusion, which can be proven by the fact of causal contingency? What you discern as a hierarchy, is in fact, only one component in the system... and even so, does this observed hierarchy retain its imaged status throughout the dialectical process of being?
Quoting apokrisis
Do you take dictation from nature or use intelligence to mediate?
So corporations, privatisation and deregulation meet the definition of cruel and oppressive state rule. Sounds legit.
I've pretty much said my piece on this. The OP said it was hard to think of a big man-made system that's not hierarchical. I offered the Internet not only as an example of a non-hierarchical system, but also one that was easy to think of.
The link you posted claiming the Internet is hierarchical failed to offer evidence or make a case. I agree that the hardware of the Internet, running over the existing 20th century telecommunications network, is hierarchical. The Internet as a whole, though, is peer-to-peer; as our conversation illustrates. I don't have to go up my management chain and down yours in order to speak to you. Everyone in the world is directly connected to each other.
Of course hierarchies have arisen in the software layer (Facebook, etc.), but they don't invalidate the basic point.
The OP hasn't seen fit to reply to me, and I don't have sufficient passion for the subject to reply in detail to your interesting points. I made my points in my initial post and have nothing more to add. The Internet is a peer-to-peer system, despite the hierarchical hardware and the hierarchical Domain name system. And therefore not everything we make is hierarchical. There's at least one exception. We live in an age of disintermediation, or at least so the early Internet theorists believed. You can buy a Gutenberg Bible, you no longer need a priest to tell you the word of God. The printing press was a great blow to hierarchy of its day. Of course governments and corporations are getting a pretty good stranglehold on the Internet these days, which does support your point.
You are making my point.
Quoting apokrisis
The Internet didn't abolish human nature. And cancel culture doesn't need the Internet. Chairman Mao's cultural revolution did fine without it. You are listing all the hierarchical ills of the world and claiming them as evidence that the Internet is hierarchical. That's a terrible debating point. What does Trump have to do with it? You know, American politics is somewhat anti-hierarchical. That's yet another example I could give. Federalism. The president is not boss of the states. Of course in recent decades the Feds have learned to pressure the states by withholding funds and so forth, but our system has much more local autonomy than most other democratic systems, by design.
How exactly is Trump a debating point in favor of the thesis that the Internet is a hierarchy? Can you see that your enthusiasm for your thesis is causing your logic to be a bit weak?
In fact it does.
Quoting fishfry
It absolutely doesn’t.
Like the OP, you are applying a lay concept of a hierarchy. I am defending something else.
Yeah, I give up. If you don’t get network theory, then I’ll leave it there.
"We're not worthy!" :-)
Quoting apokrisis
You should get some self-awareness. When you know you're wrong, you get personal. Saw that before.
Your peer to peer angle is talking about the blank canvas before the structure self organises,
Your harking on about control hierarchies - the popular mechanical conception - is bypassing my arguments based on physical and biological principles.
That’s ok. You never studied these things. And you have no interest.
My apologies, I was so focused on exchanging with apokrisis I didn't quite pick up on the objection in your reply. I guess I didn't consider it relevant to my objections because you were responding to a citation which I am not dogmatic about. There the fella just says it's hard to think of anything without hierarchy. Yes, you provided a counter example. I think what's more interesting is whether the concept of hierarchy is just an isolated emphasis that obscures the causal contingency of structures? It seems to me there must be something to this because existence is not a hierarchy, but quite literally, a fluctuating movement of causal contingency.
I can only wonder if the technical knowledge you speak of really does untrench the system from the questions that were raised? If not, then all you are doing here is retreating to formalism.
I am indeed interested in this topic. That's why I started the thread. I am certainly not trying to alienate you. I have ordered some materials and am likely to be discussing this topic more in the future. It's truly fascinating and it makes bold, authoritative claims about reality. You have most certainly been able to construct a profound polemic from it. I have appreciated the opportunity to engage with you.
The notion that what humans find attractive is largely biologically determined is from the dark ages? Your characterisations, every one of them really, come from your ego and bias, it is silly. You accused Carlos of fatalism and then stopped replying to him. It seems what I said went over your head, even if Dr. Schore's work was correct and you were correct in understanding and applying his work to your positions, it wouldn't undermine anything I've said in the slightest. I do not wish to continue this discussion though, I can only show you what you are doing and if you wish to continue, that is not something anyone can disrupt.
Carlos nowhere made this argument. You are here making the assertion of it, hoping that it will bolster your false metaphysic of predetermined and predestined human nature. Like I said to Carlos, in some cultures they physically alter their bodies, it is unlikely you would be attracted to people from these cultures, just like they wouldn't be attracted to you. Attraction derives from your cultural experience.
You have railed against me in the name of some human nature metaphysic, merely asserted that Dr. Schore's work has nothing to do with your authoritarian claims, when it stands as an exhaustive, empirical and scientific refutation. I am not the dogmatist here. It seems very much like you have a bias against your own socially contingent being, which is to say, even though the evidence is overwhelming regarding the social development of human beings, you are still bent to holding onto your dark ages idealism, and that's exactly what it is. How to produce a healthy human being is not merely asserted by Schore, it is meticulously justified and defended.
What annoys me the most about people like yourself is that you come from the reactionary line, you just can't handle the fact that the more we learn the more the conservative narrative is obliterated. Surprise, surprise, in every direction we go, from social psychology to sociology, we find the same thing, humans are contingent on social structures. There is no such thing as an autonomous human being, no such thing as a self-made individual. All your quality is based on the quality of your social experience.
I've yet to actually see you show that you understand Dr. Schore, I've been listening to him and I don't have any problems with what I've heard him say at all, I think he's been co-opted by you in a strange way to be used for your worldview. Can you talk about his work in the same way apokrisis talks about hierarchy theory? I've yet to see it. The way you talk about him and the way I hear Dr. Schore talk about his ideas, incomparable.
Basically, as usual with you Jerseyflight, you have no idea how little you know about my position. I think hearing that I disagree with you is sufficient to begin a creative narration, which as usual, comprises the bulk of your argumentation. You didn't understand my issue with you, I explained it fairly clearly and I am pretty convinced that Dr . Schore is not the reason you think this way, rather, you like him because you feel he is saying what you always thought. If you were even remotely similar to how he explains his own ideas, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
That is correct. He has simply validated what many other responsible philosophers have speculated about. Keep in mind, he is not using his work polemically, I am and will continue to do so. That's the beauty of work like his, it transcends its own field. Like I said in another thread, philosophy has not caught up to attachment theory but it will, and it will turn philosophy away from the futility and vanity of its abstraction. Now that you have been listening to Schore it should be pretty damn obvious to you that your human nature schema is false. The quality of life is contingent on nurture. One doesn't even need Schore to prove this, you did not feed and wean yourself as a baby.
What I've listened to Dr. Schore saying has confirmed that firstly, you are terrible at paraphrasing him and although you cite him to justify how you use his work, your understanding is not something he is endorsing. Secondly, you misunderstand to what extent Dr. Schore is actually nurture-orientated, he is not trying to establish some dichotomy between nature and nurture but explains that the two work together. This is my position also, I think almost nobody you've cited Dr. Schore to has actually been invalidated by Dr. Schore in the way you think they were. I think that you have a barebones or worse understanding, of him and probably shouldn't be citing him at all.
Also, the people you've cited him against, you were arguing against positions that you gave them through narration and characterisation, not their explicit admission. Same here. I don't know what you think Dr. Schore would be correcting me about but it's almost certainly not something I've explicitly stated.
"...alteration of the infant’s social environment specifically induces a diminution of the former socioaffective adaptations. The dyad’s response to this stressful alteration of the relationship is instrumental to the final structural maturation of an adaptive cortical system that can self-regulate emotional states." Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, pg.20, Routledge 2016
Like I said, 'how to produce a healthy human being is not merely asserted by Schore, it is meticulously justified and defended.'
I have an expansion on this position because I comprehend it within the context of class structure.
Because you have been refuted, you now want to take another course in an attempt to attack me. Get over it fella. There's lots of stuff about yourself and the world you don't know, stuff you can never obtain from philosophy. I recommended reading in psychology and sociology. You are on a good path with Dr. Schore.
I admit when I've been refuted, I am happy to learn from others even if they offer a better understanding in an unflattering way.
You called me a "human-nature-supernaturalist" but news flash, that doesn't make me one. You merely ascribe positions as a way of debating people, it's a constant. I wouldn't describe myself as conservative either, but, I guess it doesn't matter what I say does it?
You said was "better society from better humans requires better environment and high-quality nutrients" and then you expect me to deduce from that "oh, he's talking about 0-2-year-old development" to the exclusion of I don't know, literally anything else? I didn't tell you that you're wrong, I just said, there's no way I'm going to agree with that because it means I allow you to dictate what is "better" in each context.
Dr Schore would not say "you are nurture" or "you wouldn't be able to talk to me without the proper nutrients" because he doesn't try to create this ridiculous dichotomy between nature and nurture. You aren't using his language, or his understanding or his characterisations. I can agree with Dr Schore and learn from him, without being refuted by you, because you have simply co-opted him, without really understanding him, into your ideological outlook. This conversation is just incredibly silly, I've met few posters quite as fallacious as you. I will just try to avoid you where I can.
These statements are empirical statements regarding the concrete nature of your being and your quality. It has never been my intent to create a "ridiculous dichotomy," but to lead with what is relevant. Of course we have natural equipment and gene structures, but all of the research in this area tells us that environment is paramount in determining their developmental course. Try refuting the statements I made as opposed to characterizing them or trying to assign an argument to my position that I did not make.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Haha, you're too much.
There are self-organizing hierarchies in nature. In human life their are both self-organized and authoritatively imposed hierarchies and/or authoritarian hierarchies.
Is the ideological text I cited much ado about nothing? It won't be long until we see its proliferation. I think you're the only person on this thread who would take the position that this is not an important topic. The questions here are not so easily swept aside. The affirmative position is basically telling us that Hierarchy Theory has cracked the code of nature. I have raised valid concerns regarding tyranny. Further, when you have a theory with as much authority as Hierarchy Theory, it is precisely something that critical thought needs to be applied to.
What point are you trying to make? Even if Hierarchy Theory has "cracked the code of nature", so what? As I said nature is replete with hierarchy, that much seems obvious; we don't need Hierarchy Theory to tell us that, all we have to do is look around.
Nature's hierarchies are not imposed by authority (unless there is a God, which we seem to have no rational justification for thinking).
Many human hierarchies are based upon the idea of, and even dictatorially imposed by, authority. The existence of self-organizing hierarchies in nature cannot provide ethical justification for any human hierarchy based on authority or brainwashing or coercion and so on.
What exactly in what I say here are you objecting to (if you are)?
That this topic is not just "much ado about nothing."
Good reply. The curious thing is that @JerseyFlight says his perspective is Hegelian. But the Hegelian view of history was that it was a journey of progress towards a well balanced social order - one that properly expressed the dialectic of individual striving and collective rational order.
And that is the organic notion of a hierarchy. Peirce argued that the entire Cosmos expresses the same dynamic. The universe was a story of a universal increase in “general reasonableness”.
The kind of hierarchy everyone is attacking is a mechanical one. That is, one which is a rigid system of top-down control and no balancing bottom-up freedom. So a dictatorship or a slave owning elite.
The people at the top of the social order lay down the rules that suit their personal purposes. Then the people at the bottom find their actions completely determined by some rigid system of control. Either there is a state security apparatus and propaganda machinery - a Stazi - to take away all meaningful freedoms. Or, as with slaves, humans actually become property and treated by the system as such.
The organic model of a hierarchy which I have been talking about is of course at the opposite end of the spectrum.
The whole point of the top down constraints is to create a generalised set of individual freedoms. The constraints certainly have to shape behaviour in ways that are pro-social. So they do limit “freedoms” in that sense. But then the flip side is that the constraints positively fosters the freedoms which a society - as an organism - finds constructive.
As I said, a dictatorship or tyranny is also only about serving the purposes of the small circle at the top of the pile. In an organic hierarchy, the highest scale of organisation represents the collective purpose of the system. It is the opposite of personalised purpose. It is the purpose of the collective whole - as encoded in some system of law, rights, governance, custom, etc.
So sure, everything is wrong about a mechanical hierarchy. But that counts as the bleeding obvious.
My case is all about the natural inevitability of the other kind of hierarchy. I am pointing out that nature is in general organised by the rational principle of striking functional balances.
You need to separate the rival forces of competition and cooperation in a way that makes the best sense. And that means a local~global division where competition is the bottom up constructive drive and cooperation is the collective top down guiding hand of a system of constraint.
And if that is the order that Nature demonstrates to be rational, it would seem you would have to offer some new reason for why that wouldn’t also be optimal as the “ethical basis” of human social organisation.
The question is whether or not Hierarchy Theory really escapes this model, or just ends up reframing it under the name of "organic hierarchy?" I don't believe we can rule this out, your good faith and democratic intentions, don't necessarily prelude other interpretations.
Quoting apokrisis
And I have been pointing out that what we observe in nature is not the final word of exemplification, but is subject to the mediation of thought. You are claiming that these observations all fall in line with democratic process, and suppose they don't, suppose another interpretation sees mechanistic hierarchy in nature, what is your conclusion then? We already know, you have stated it, one cannot argue against nature (see your final quote below). Here is the creation of a category immune to criticism.
Further, and this is perhaps the most significant point I have made, what we observe in nature is lacking thought's mediation! If I am reading you correctly, you seem to be saying that the process you observe in nature, must always be considered superior, is in fact, the standard of thought, the very basis of what constitutes an intelligent ethic? If this is the case I do not call it intelligence, but mindlessness disguised as intelligence.
Quoting apokrisis
This is exactly my problem. The answer has already been given, because what we observe in nature is lacking the mediation of thought, it is mechanical and mindless in this sense. You are arguing that we are not even allowed to apply thought here, that what we observe (more like, interpret) must be taken as a divine natural law. So tell me why humans could not decide to apply thought to organization? Nature is not the standard, thought is, most specifically as it pivots itself from the angle of man's context.
You seem to fail to comprehend that thought is always standing in a position of mediation here, it is transcendent in this sense, not in any supernatural way, but in a way that you are already determining, that the thing you are observing in nature, qualifies as being ethical and intelligent, not from the basis of the thing, but exterior to it. It is by the power of thought that you conclude that Hierarchy Theory is a good thing. Not sure you understand this?
If you can’t rule it out, then you need to provide your reasons.
Quoting JerseyFlight
It is a scientific claim. So it is either supported by the evidence or not.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Oh, if only you did seem to be applying thought!
So far there has only been groundless doubting based on deep misunderstanding.
Yeah, well I did reference a book that argued exactly this thing. Further, is it the case that your democratic interpretation is the only one that can be deduced from the theory?
Quoting apokrisis
No, your casting of nature as a normative, ethical category is not scientific!
It is worth noting how the internet is actually all about the dialectic of connection and memory. So TCP/IP is half the story. The other half is having unlimited memory for everything that happens on the internet.
That is why hierarchical organisation results. It is already baked in by the fact that interactions have a local and global aspect. There is the traffic pattern of connections. And then there is the accumulating memory of the patterns with the most apparent significance. And that memory of what’s popular begins to feedback to constrain the traffic. What might start out appearing to be just random linkages become eventually deeply reinforced habits.
So the internet was based on removing the physical constraints on these two complementary aspects of any self-organising hierarchy - its synchronic action and its diachronic identity.
The internet actually took off with the World Wide Web hyperlink protocol that connected an unlimited connectivity to an unlimited memory. This allowed any text to be connected to any text. And that became a valuable thing precisely to the degree it formed some self-organised hierarchy of connectivity.
The hyperlinking was then extended to other data structures like images, audio, and eventually will become an internet of things.
The idea of a flat network as an ideal in social relations is strangely fetishised in modern life. There’s a familiar political story there. But a society with only “in the moment“ interactions and no memory - an amnesiac society - would be a rather disastrous thing.
So in creating the internet, computer science already knew that unlimited communication needed to be paired with unlimited memory to have “a system”. The whole point was to construct something which would self-organise in a functional way.
A flat communication protocol was not the revolution all on its own. It is the fact that the internet also never forgets anything that happened. It’s whole history carries a weight that is felt by any further interactions. And it was a hyperlink protocol - one that embedded the further ideal of establishing preferential attachment - that gave everything liftoff.
A network became a network of networks. A multilevel network. A hierarchy in other words.
Yes, in a way I think it could be said that whatever political and social hierarchies have existed in human life have come about due to self-organization, and that the idea that they have been imposed by authority is the narrower view.
Because humans can, thanks to language, reflect upon the human condition, impute agency to rational actors and so on, we tend to fall into the delusion that we are, or could be, or should be, masters of our own destinies, both at the local individual and community scales, and at the global international political scales.
It seems that the prosperity enabled by cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels has created a self-organizing juggernaut consumerist culture and economy and an accompanying ethos of growth at all costs, and no one seems to have the will or the wherewithal to halt its apparently catastrophic trajectory.
Of course within this culture there are concentrated nodes of power, but it seems that those with the most power are the most psychopathic, the most lacking in compassion and general concern for humanity, the environment and other species. It seems like those who care the least about others are the ones most suited to gaining power, because they will stop at nothing.
The human condition seems tragic; to be a species governed by the least enlightened, the most callous and determinedly self-interested among us. If in most hierarchies it is the global conditions and constraints that "teleologically" determine the evolution of the system, there would seem to be no human (i.e. truly socially and communally motivated) equivalent in our systems.
We seem to be driven, despite our protestation to the contrary, by the dissipative drive of entropy; and this is a "god' we could never consciously worship, but rather an unconscious one we would need to learn to resist, if we hope to survive in any form of civilization.
How our we going to learn that? Seems to be a nigh on impossible task, even if it were authentically acknowledged as a needed task to be fulfilled at all, which would itself seem to be a tremendous hurdle.