TREE VS. NET
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From: Bruce S.
Date: Thursday, September 13, 2007, 3:27 PM
Subject: Tree vs. Net
Reply to: 261002
ID: 258474

This thing about "trees" -- we get attached to the idea that the tree is a permanent structure, but what you seem to be saying, Jeanie -- and what Varela is saying (and Hampden-Turner is saying) is that the tree is NOT a permanent structure -- it's a heuristic -- it comes into being for a moment, for the purposes of that moment -- and then it dissolves...

It's this "local and ad hoc" quality that the traditional objectors to hierarchical models have not recognized. Yes, of course it is true that we can't "parse the world in one rigid way for all time and all people." But that does not mean that we do not parse the world...

We absolutely do -- commit acts of "top-down discrimination" -- we do it all the time. But our framework -- is fluent, flexible, adaptive. We flash out some model of reality that is more or less consistent with our stable big picture -- but the details, the exact character of what we are saying or doing at that moment -- is totally dependent on who we are talking to, and how we understand their thinking and presumptions and expectations....

So, we "custom tailor" our statements -- and the way we frame our ideas and concepts.

This is the power of hierarchy in cognition. When I learned the concept of "stipulative definition" years ago, that freed this idea in my mind. Words mean what we want them to mean -- and we keep refining our definitions until we are satisfied that the person we are talking to does adequately understand what we are saying....

This tension between net and tree -- makes me think of the relationship of the individual personal computer to the internet. Our personal computers are totally "tree structured". That's how the operating system organizes the file structure -- strictly top-down linear (just click on "My Computer" on a Windows computer to see this framework).

... though I guess we could argue that functions like .dll files -- dynamic link libraries -- that are shared between programs -- are "flat" rather than hierarchical ("higher/lower").

The Internet is a vast pool of free associations, trip around as you will. But as you pull together your own personal "take" on everything -- you are building a tree-structure file hierarchy....

We used to hear that model: the Internet as one giant hard-drive...

And I had some kind of related fantasy -- that there could be "one highest center" -- one top- level node -- through this entire vast network....

Not because somebody had "imposed" it -- or "stipulated" it -- but because it was mathematically optimal -- and you're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't go with it...

All of this, I think, as Varela and Hampden-Turner suggest -- has a lot to do with "conscious evolution" (conscious purpose). Are we "intending" our common future, according to some purpose we are conceiving -- or is this purpose, if any, emerging through the "random" interconnectivities of the NET... ?

---- On Thu, Sep 13, 2007, Jeanie DeRousseau wrote ---

So... the tree and the net feel very seminal to me to the many and the one, me and you, to LightPages.

Let's consider that the net/right hemisphere/nonlinear/wholeness is a metaphor for undifferentiated connectivity. Let's consider that the tree or something like the tree in more than one dimension happens whenever 2 or more centers initiate a manifestation. The net would be evermore, but the tree would be impermanent. Still, there's a relationship because the tree would be overlain on the net in a hierarchical fashion.

If we make a net in LightPages, but allow tree formation to occur and dissolve, will we replicate the implicate order?

Just thoughts to test the system...er, environment.

Love, Jeanie

P.S. One click brought me to this page, since I was already logged in... very nice!

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