On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Natasha Vita-More <natasha@natasha.cc>wrote:
> Hi Salvatore. Forgive me for responding before David has the opportunity
> to
> answer your message, but I'd like to address the following paragraph:
>
> "And the results, however embryonic they might be, are very far from the
> ideas of ontologies, and tends more to a multi-layered description of
> reality in which an observer (human/technological/other) must nomadically
> move from layer to layer to create his/her/its interpretation of the world,
> effectively "wearing" other points of view."
>
> Are we not once again back to second-order cybernetics where the observer
> is
> not just part of the observation, but is building a design ecology while
> enhancing him/her/itself?
>
well, i guess it is if you focus on "closed-sourced" (as opposed to
"open-sourced") systems. But recursion is so intriguing that we might try
and reframe all this on a n-order cybernetics, which is something that more
than one researcher tried to envision in more than one way and for various
reasons, starting from a "2.5" order of the social cybernetics of Umbpleby
to all the discourses approaching third-orders such as in Lucas, Pocock and
Palmer, investigating on complexity, autoreflection, virtualization and in
things that we can somehow identify as reflexive autopoietic systems theory.
and also merging all of this to the wonderful insights that software has
provided in arts, sciences, and social practices.
I can give accounts for my personal research paths, where i have found
several levels to interweave. As an example among thousands i often found
myself focusing on the suggestive insights sometimes coming from Foerster
when dealing with Ethics/Metaphysics/Dialogics.
In these perspectives it is possible to imagine recursing upward into
n-orders by opening up systems and not actually providing frameworks but
working on something that can be referred to as consulency: a
mission-without-a-mission whose main goal is harmony, or the observation of
harmony, or the observation of how observed and observers move closer or
farther from states of Rest. And please allow me to use a capital letter
only to suggest an idea of rest that comes from mystical domains not with
the purpose of losing contact with the scientifical methods, but to have a
synthetic way to describe a complex view on dynamic equilibriums, on
interactive definitions of beauty, on evolving and relational descriptions
of health and well-being that can be applied to humans and to the other
elements of nature.
Software, again, and digital technologies give sufficiently precise accounts
on potentially interesting places to look into. Among the most overhyped of
them, augmented reality, allows giving (very simple, as of now)
implementations to efforts like the ones by Zangeneh and Haydon when they
speak about "multiple realities shaped by social, cultural, economic,
ethnic, gender and disability values, which centralize on the asymmetric
power relations in society" in dealing with psycho structural cybernetic
models.
or even if we think to Guatari an Bateson and their "art of composing
mutable worlds, where the goal of the participants is to carry out
continuous transformation of the very parameters and coordinates on which
their interactions are based (this is also understood as 3rd-order
cybernetics, where the system produces not just new information, but new
categories of information)" (Brian Holmes)
And we can look at complex systems theories focusing on "partial ignorance",
to confront "openness" to confront the domains that are left unattended by
strictly ontological approaches. For example with Didier Dubois here:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1365110
I actually don't see anthropocentrism being able to "disappear". Or even to
evolve that easily or that much.
yet i see many opportunities in open-sourced systems that allow for
stratification, for layering of different goals and strategies, of different
sensibilities, and on their mutual interaction, and on the possibility
offered by porous skins and by fluid, dynamic, temporary, nomadic
interconnections.
ciao!
salvatore
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