604 Unity and diversity

 Through the ages, some people strove for unity, in universal ideas or rules, applying to everyone everywhere, while other strove for recognition of diversity. Plato was a paradigmatic example of the first, Aristotle of the second. The latter proposed that only particulars exist, and generalisations are only notional.

 As recounted by Stephen Toulmin in his book ‘Cosmopolis’, in the Enlightenment in the 17^th century there was a revolutionary explosion of the drive towards universal absolutes for science and theory with geometry as the ideal. There is a mistake here. In ‘ordinary’ geometry there is a law that parallel lines do not intersect, but on a globe they do.

 In evolution, diversity, in the struggle of ‘survival of the fittest’ is needed for evolutionary selection to work. Diversity is needed for innovation; for the emergence of ‘novel combinations’

 The duality of unity and diversity is found in the history of ideas and knowledge, and in politics. In politics, some people strive for a homogeneous population, and the same rules for everyone, as in nationalism. This is inconsistent when accompanied with discrimination an exclusion or discrimination of foreigners, especially immigrants. To deserve the name, a democracy accepts and values variety of ideas, customs, and political views, and this diversity needs to be protected. It is a democratic duty to accept different views, as long as they remain within the law, and be prepared to listen and respond to them. Variety,  debate and demonstrations of rival ideas are essential.

 This makes democratic governance messy, confusing, and inefficient. Some universalists want to leave everything up to the working if markets,  without interference. They go for negative freedom, and concentration on national, short term welfare. Military support of Ukraine should be reduced or abandoned.  Maximum speed on road needs to be at a minimum. Farmers should be less constrained in ecological destruction. Airlines should be less constrained to produce noise and consume kerosene. Industries should be less constrained in pollution. Wealth should not be limited.

 Democrats acknowledge that some people are poor, different in potential, or otherwise constricted from resources, lacking positive freedom, and strive for social measures for help, and limits to negative freedom, to prevent outrageous inequality of wealth and income.

 If one rejects universality, is there then no generality and abstraction? Yes: without generalisation there is no theory. Most argument and all science need it But it is partial and temporary. In a world of ongoing change and transformation, generalisations apply only to a limited range of phenomena, and temporarily. The world as a whole is in ongoing turmoil, where fixed laws break down regularly.

 The wise person appreciates both diversity and generality, but generalises sparingly and incidentally, with a keen eye for exceptions.

 Take agriculture, where large corporations of animal feeds, chemical fertilizers, and export, enforce uniform procedures for economies of scale, that forces out individual farmers who want to experiment and adopt small scale ecological farming. Uniformity forces out variety. This is one of the banes of modern capitalism.

 603 Conservative blockage of learning and innovation.

 There are many blockages. A general one is that many people are not eager ‘to step out of the box’. Such a step may destroy reputation, endanger a job or position, hurt friendships, disable your position in networks.

 In networks, one can be imprisoned in a position by one’s ties.

 Another obstacle is the loss of economies of scale attached to established procedures , as mentioned in the previous item in his blog.

 This conservatism also arises among scientists. Lakatos proposed the theory of ‘research programmes’ that harbour a ‘hard core’ of basic assumptions that my not be broken. There is a ‘protective belt’ of subsidiary assumptions that can be modified to protect the core when it is threatened by falsification. In economics, the assumption of the maximisation of utility by rational actors is an example of a sacrosanct core assumption. If it is threatened by the facts, one picks a more sophisticated production- or utility function. If your work violates the core, you will have to institute a new journal with like-minded.

 In the economy there are economies of scale, but also diseconomies. Communication in an organisation increases with the number of direct contacts in the network, which increases quadratically with the number of people, which increasingly crowds out work. That is why hierarchy invented, to limit the explosion of communication.

 Something similar arises in systems in general. As the number of elements increases, such as organs in an organism, or people in a community, more institutions are needed to keep the elements in concert with the purpose of the system. I call this ‘institutional crowding’. To keep the human body in its ‘homeostasis’, we need blood, a heart and a system of arteries, a breathing system that brings oxygen in the blood stream, a system of neuronal paths to trigger muscles, emotions and cognition, hormones to regulate them, and white blood cells that constitute a system of immunity, sweat to lower heat, and tears to lubricate eyes. As systems expand, elements become more specialised, complicating hom

In social systems we need laws and regulations to keep people in line with the goals of the community, and to satisfy needs. These, in turn, need controls to prevent fraud and errors. In a democracy, it is hard not to satisfy needs and wishes, and institutional crowding results, the more when there is diversity of needs. People get spoiled by the regulations, and lose the ability to cope with problems.

 Institutional crowding is increased by the goal of equality, combined with the fact of diversity. The ideal of equality enforces equality of public service, but diversity of people calls for diversity of regulation. Some services have been delegated by the state to municipalities from the idea that those are ‘closer to the citizens’, and better able to offer tailor-made services, but this is raising a clamour of inequality that is unjust, Then regulations are increased to compensate for this inequality, further deepening the problem of institutional crowding. Institutional crowding immobilises the system, and to enable transformation it has to be pruned. But political competition makes this hard. It is easier to add benefits than to scrap them.

 Thus, democracy is grinding itself into the ground, and this causing a strengthening call for an autocratic regime, which will make matters worse.

 

 

A familiar phenomenon is that a couple of young entrepreneurs make an invention and set up a business to exploit it., with own capital or crowd funding. That is a good side of capitalism. Next. if it is a success and enjoys a breakthrough in the market, they seek capital to finance their expansion. Then they become dependent on the board of shareholders, who are often not themselves entrepreneurs, accept only incremental, not radical innovation, smother the entrepreneurial spirit of the founders, and enforce customary policies for shareholder value, that economise on labour, and reduce service to customers, in the drive for efficiency and profit, which reduce the social value of the company, and often the service on which sales depend. Shareholders thus often have a conservative effect..

 

602 Change of knowledge

 You can add to your knowledge in two ways: adopt it from an outside source, or invent it yourself. In the ‘circle of discovery’ (COD) that I derived from the work of Jean Piaget The first is called ‘assimilation’, and the second ‘accommodation’ In the first, you try to fit the new knowledge into your current mindframe. The first can lead on to the second. in several stages: in generalising assimilation you try to apply existing knowledge in a new environment If that does not suffice, you can tap into your memory for other variants that you tried before. If that still not suffices, you can try to adopt elements from your new environment that succeed where you fail. That is likely to cause obstacles or duplications that you need to go around or delete to make a coherent system, in a new whole. That is accommodation. This reflects the dictum of Hegel that failure is needed for invention.

 I elaborated the COD with the notion of a ‘script’, a network of nodes, each with a repertoire of subscripts. If the script does not work well, you can first try a different subscript from on or more nodes. If that does not suffice, you can adopt a subscript from one  or more nodes from a local script, and next, if that does not suffice, one or more entire nodes. I call that ‘reciprocation’. This introduction of a foreign node is likely not to give a perfect fit, and you try to craft an entire new script, with old and new nodes, in a new structure. That may still contain remnants from the old script that need to be weeded out. I call that ‘consolidation’. Then, later, you may engage again in differentiation, in the struggle of competition.

 The example I used was that of a restaurant. The nodes are entry, seating, ordering, paying, and leaving. The script is embedded in a ‘superscript’ of buildings and streets, zoning, parking, with a distribution system of materials. The repertoire of subscripts of the paying node are cash, card, or telephone. Checks are no longer used. An example of reciprocation, is to replace cutlery by chopsticks, in Asia. The transformation, or accommodation, is the shift to a self-service restaurant, with more or less the same nodes, in a different structure, with a different succession of nodes: entry, selecting food, paying, seating and leaving. The subscripts of nodes are not exactly the same: seating now includes carrying a tray with selected food.

 The script notion has a wide area of application, applying to all systems, forming a system of systems.

 The COD  also applies to communication. To communicate, you must assimilate what your interlocutor says and does, and you must accommodate your thinking to it. In this way, communication yields invention.

I offer a new service on my website www.bartnooteboom.nl: If you are interested in on of the items on the blog, and you want to know more, I can send you any book on the website, free of charge, in an electronic version, if you send me an email, at bart.nooteboom@gmail.com, with the  title of the book and a few lines to tell me why you are interested.

 601 Networks

 Script networks are usually linear, with few side branches, indicating the sequence of some practice. Other networks are often wide, with many intersecting branches and are more volatile than a script. Human networks serve for the exchange of capital of different sorts: Economic, social, cultural (including knowledge, information) and symbolic. Symbolic capital is prestige, reputation, fame, and the like.

 Networks vary in their density, i.e. number of direct ties between nodes, and the strength of those ties. Maximum density is n(n-1)/2 , where n is the number of nodes. With n=3, density is 3. High density yields much exchange of resources, but the corresponding communication may crowd out activities in a node. That is why hierarchy was invented, to limit communication  to the next level up or down the hierarchy. Strength of a tie is the number of activities involved in it, duration and frequency of the exchange, and the degree to which it carries ‘specific investments’, dedicated to the tie and useless elsewhere. Examples are machines or instruments or training dedicated to a relation. When the relation breaks, the investment becomes useless.

 For a node it matters how many direct ties it has, and where in the network it is located. If it has many direct ties, this is called ‘network centrality’. It yields the benefit of direct access to many resources, and being popular to have a tie with, but the drawback of getting locked in. ‘Network centrality’ is that many indirect ties between nodes run through it. The advantage is to have many contacts, direct  near and indirect afar, with varied resources and information, but it can lead to an overload that exceeds its absorptive capacity. An ideal structure is that of ‘small worlds’, with dense patches of strong ties, mutually connected by weak ties. The dense patches yield the advantage of a ‘buzz’ of intense exchange with reputation mechanisms, and weak external ties to widen access to resources and prevent stagnation of an ‘in-crowd’. A ‘peripheral position’ yields the benefit of dense local ties, with weak ties to other communities yielding wider variety of resources. This is the position of an ambassador or ‘boundary spanner’, but the risk of losing trust because of the ties with ‘outsiders’.

Networks arise spontaneously, to exchange capital. They carry the risk of exclusion: you are accepted as a member only if you have some worthwhile capital to contribute: economic, intellectual, cultural or symbolic. Those who are low on education, intellectual capital, and on prestige, symbolic capital, are excluded. They also lack acquaintances who can act as ‘wheelbarrows’ into networks, They feel neglected and ignored, and this is one of the causes of the present discontent of the poor and low educated. They feel left out, denigrated, scoffed at. But they are free to enter social media, and they do so, to excesses of rancour, grudges, expressed in invective that takes revenge on the well-connected ‘elite’, and retaliate with being ‘influencers’ who crack unfounded firecrackers.  

 

 600 Transformation

I have not posted anything on my blog for some time, because I was involved in writing a book, with the title ‘Transformation’. It is a sequel to a book entitled ‘Process Philosophy’, published in 2021 by Anthem Publishers. That book is now in reprint, in paperback, to be published in 2025.The new book is currently in review at an international publisher. In the upcoming items in this blog, I will elaborate and give illustrations in different areas.
 

In the book ‘Process Philosophy’, I discussed change, distinguishing gradual, incremental change, treated as the realisation of potential, and radical, structural change, treated as the breakthrough to new potential. An example of the realisation of potential is how an oak grows from an acorn. I formalised the subject with the notion of a ‘script’. A script is a network of nodes that model component activities of the whole, each node with a repertoire of ‘subscripts’. The subscripts are connected by sequence in time, causality, or shared resources. Minor change is the selection of a different subscript from the repertoire, in response to what happens in the environment. A situation can arise where this change is not adequate, usually in a new environment, and attempts at adaptation are made by adopting subscripts or entire nodes from other local scripts, which succeed where the focal script fails, and threatens to collapse. The script as a whole is subscript in some encompassing ‘superscript’. Transformation, radical change, then is a new script with familiar and new nodes in a new structure.

 The example used was that of a restaurant, where the nodes are entry, seating, ordering, eating, paying and leaving. The superscript is the built environment, with its streets, zoning, lighting, ducts, parking, regulations, and supply chains. Minor change, realisation of existing structure, is the selection of a new subscript in a node, such as chopsticks replacing cutlery, or cash payment by payment by card or telephone. An example of transformation is that of a shift from a service restaurant to a self-service one. The nodes are similar, but their order is changed to entry, food selection, payment, seating, and leaving. The subscripts of nodes are not necessarily identical. There no longer is the service of a waiter, and seating involves carrying a tray with selected food.

 This is a model of systems in general. A system is a structure of elements that are connected in interaction, yielding effects of the whole system that the elements do not have by themselves. This is called ‘emergence’. The system as a whole interacts with others in its environment. An isolated system will decay, falling apart, in the striving of nature towards maximal ‘entropy’, disorder. That happens in death, for example. Systems need outside connections, but this does not mean that ‘everything is connected  with everything else’, though they may be connected indirectly, through a direct tie.

 Everything is a system in movement, with interaction of its parts and its environment. That view is the basis of ‘Process Philosophy’.

A stone is a structure of atoms that move with temperature, and above a critical temperature I will break apart. In thawing frost, water molecules break loose from the crystal structure of ice, and when the water cooks, they break loose from the water and evaporate in steam. That belongs to the potential of H2O. Oxygen feeds fires and metabolism in animals and plants, and in the process is transformed into CO2 In electromotors, electrons  are transformed into kinetic energy, or vice versa. .

 There are wider networks of connected systems They will be discussed in a later blog.

 

599 Design of a society

 Currently I am writing a book with the title ‘Design of a society’, in Dutch. I will also write an English version. In due time, see my website.

 I do not pretend to be able to found a society, but I can specify what is desirable in it. The book gives the design of a society, based on the sixfold causality of Aristotle: the ‘efficient, final, material, formal, conditional and exemplary cause. There is a. chapter for each cause.

 The desired society is oriented towards the flourishing of ‘Homo Faber’ and ‘Homo Ludens’; the making of things, and the playing, experimenting with things. Crucial in this is the ability to ‘assimilate’ and to ‘accommodate’, learning through absorption, and learning through invention, in the first chapter.

 The second chapter is about the final cause, the motivation of people to make things. The third chapter is about the material cause, the means of production. In contrast with earlier thought, that is not nature, but is a task for the economy. Markets play a large role in this, but there are various imperfections of markets that require intervention. I plead for an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI).

 Het fourth chapter is about the needed competencies, th formal cause. In particular, that goes into the ability of assimilation and accommodation, and into the need for elations between people, with Martin Buber’s idea of reciprocation between people, instead of the purely instrumental relations in pure self-interest. Such interchange requires trust, and it is an art to conduct that well. The fifth chapter treats the needed education and schooling for those abilities, and ethics. The main role lies with the Aristotelian virtue of ‘phronesis’. That is also im[ortant in the practical action of Homo Faber.

 The sixth chapter treats of the conditional cause, in particular institutions. It discusses the task of establishing a balance of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom, of regulation for the public cause and freedom of action for the individual. It is needed to limit the complexity of regulation, which bureaucracy cannot cope with, in its attempt to individualise, in combination with the necessary control of fraud. Here, the UBI raises its head again.

 The seventh chapter is about nature as exemplary, not material cause as means for the use by Man, but as example and goal of good conduct. In several ways one can learn from nature in making things. Nature also deserves respect, in its magnificent manifestation of evolution. Evolution has seldom yielded organisms that defile and ruin their environment.

 

 

598. Do plants have intelligence?

 It has been written that plants have intelligence. I think that is misguided.

 Plants do have an impressive ability to adapt. Green plants grow upward to the light. Their roots grow downwards. Flowers open at daybreak and close at night. They have colours that change, and spread odours and offer honey to attract insects for pollination. They are adaptive in many ways, but this does not prove intelligence. I have proposed to use the notions of ‘assimilation’, absorption of features of the environment, into existing frames of response, and ‘accommodation’ of those frames. Intelligence requires both, but plants only have assimilation.

 How do programs of action arise? Adaptive capabilities arose from evolution. In animals DNA does not directly yield properties, but recipes for the production of proteins, which are distributed by RNA. DNA yields a variety of recipes for making proteins, in a repertoire of response. The environment determines which recipe is triggered. This has been called ‘gene expression’, which yields ‘plasticity’ Plants also have this adaptive ability. In contrast with plants, people, and to a lesser extent animals, in addition have the ability to generate new recipes in response to their environment, in other words accommodation, reconstituting recipes of conduct. Plants cannot do that. For them, repertoires of recipes change only in evolution.

 Operating recipes that were developed in evolution, is ‘instinctive’, inborn. Human beings, and to some extent animals, can go beyond instinct In other words, change of response can be ‘ontogenetic’, in the life of the individual, while with plants it is only ‘phylogenetic’.

 Plants have also been said to ‘communicate’, but interaction is not yet communication. Intelligence is strongly connected to the use of language, where new sentences can be constructed almost infinitely, with words that can change meaning. Some animals have that in some form, such as whales, tunas, and some birds. Plants don’t.

 People and some animals have self-consciousness. Elephants do, and even some fish. This has been proven by painting a stain on their skin and putting them in front of a mirror. They move a bit to better inspect the stain, and try to remove it. My cat does not have a clue, and claws the mirror to try and enter the space reflected in it.