Perceived connections, patterns, networks

Perceived connections, patterns, networks. Any consideration of networks, especially as they relate to consciousness, thought systems, history, etc. would be incomplete without some consideration of apophenia, "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena." (Robert Todd Carroll, The Skeptic's Dictionary, 1994-2005.)

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld "hits", most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena. (Carroll)

The human brain is a powerful pattern-recognition machine, evolved over the millennia. Ray Kurzweil: "Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry. These facilities make up for the extremely slow speed of human neurons." (quoted in Steven Johnson's Emergence). We evolved to see connections.

And there is some research that indicates that dopamine levels in the brain enhance pattern recognition. In a New Scientist article, "People with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences, and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none." ("Paranormal beliefs linked to brain chemistry", New Scientist, July 27, 2002.)

To the skeptic, Carl Jung's "synchronicity" is an example of apophenia. Synchronicity suggests an acausal connection between phenomena, that two apparently unrelated events reveal something. (Again, see The Skeptic's Dictionary entry on Jung for an unsympathetic view.)

Saying the world can only be understood empirically, and that empirical tests are the basis of knowledge, is problematic without taking into account the role of the brain in organizing sense data into recognizable phenomena. Inasmuch as consciousness has evolved (and continues to evolve), that science has passed through various "paradigms" since Copernicus and Galileo, and that there are "qualitative" modes of scientific practice in addition to quantitative or deductive modes suggests at least that we keep an open mind about ways to knowledge.

In this vein, one would have to say exactly what "meaning" or "meaningfulness" is, in light of coincidence and metaphor, before dismissing Jung. (Per Agent Dale Cooper: "When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention." or "Coincidence and fate figure largely in our lives. Ah! Damn good coffee!" I could swear I remember him saying "Never laugh in the face of coincidence", but that could be false or true-but-clouded memory.)

The ability of the brain to see patterns, or connections, or to make connections or leaps between two seemingly unrelated concepts -- e.g., "all the world's a stage" -- is a basic, perhaps universal, human device for exploring and understanding the new, the complex, the difficult, and perhaps the unfathomable.

Along these lines, see the Journal for Patterns Recognised: "The Journal for Patterns Recognised is a journal dedicated to the study of pattern recognition. We can recognise sheep in clouds, faces in 4 well-placed rocks and a tree in a mathematically produced set of lines. This ability to recognise familiar objects in formlessness is said to be the engine behind imagination. Therefore we understand pattern recognition gone wrong as the well from which human culture, roughly defined as the framework of socially accepted interpretations of the real, flows." For more, see the background essay, "Why a Journal for Patterns Recognised?!".

The "perceived connection where none exists", a pattern recognized where no obvious or detected material interaction is taking place between the two nodes. But a connection erupts in the mind, rich in meaning maybe, revealing something. Something has happened.

This past spring, under the Kennedy Expressway on Fullerton Avenue here in Chicago, someone observed that the water dripping down the concrete underpass had created a form like Mary, the Mother of God. There is something inherently un-testable (and what does it say about someone who wants to test it?) about images of the Virgin Mary anywhere, but regardless, the pattern recognized becomes in itself a material force as people act on the idea. As word of the Virgin of the Kennedy spread, hundreds came to pray and leave flowers, candles and other offerings. "Faithful Call Image On Underpass Wall 'Beautiful' Others Call Image Salt Stain." A few weeks later, police charged Victor Gonzalez with defacing public property by writing "Big Lie" across the image with shoe polish. Police then asked the Illinois Department of Transportation to paint over the image to prevent further trouble.

There is a network of interactions, let's say, independent of human consciousness. Say salty melted snow running off of a highway, rusting steel, dripping down concrete. Molecules interacting, the workings of ice and salt, bonds breaking and re-forming, themselves influenced by Winter yielding to Spring, by the motion of Earth around the Sun. (Is there not something wonder-full even in that process?) And then there is the interconnection of consciousness with sense perceptions, the sparking of recognition of a pattern on the concrete, yielding meanings, shared by some, contested by others. Another network, this one of ideas, thoughts, understandings. Why not the Goddess revealing herself, exerting herself, in the most mundane, dismal, anti-Nature of places, the expressway underpass, the literal underside of another network, the infrastructure of Global Warming and Planet Destruction? Or maybe the pattern recognized is "just" illusion, or dis-illusion. Prompted by the hunger of the dispossessed who beg under that underpass, and the workers crawling along Fullerton in perpetual rush-hour Chicago traffic on the way home from another day of mind-dulling, soul-stealing work; the hunger for a Sign that they might achieve a future worth living in? Or does it say that that which you long for is nothing, void of meaning, a stain? Which is the Big Lie?

Something in the "perceived connection", even if it is not agreed upon by all parties.


jd

More on maps

Related to the post yesterday about maps -- I brought along a GPS receiver, compass and topo maps on a trip to the Colorado canyonlands a couple of years ago. I wanted to work on reading maps, but it quickly became clear to me that experiencing a place through a map is not the same as experiencing the place. Certain areas of the brain fired when looking at the grids and topo lines and the numbers and drawing lines on the map, trying to convert the mapwork into geological features. But the map could not come close to the rich sensuousness of sitting and listening, hearing, smelling, seeing the place.

This is the difference between the network diagram and the process (I hesitate to even use "network" as synonym for "process", as "network" suggests that a derivation or abstraction has already taken place). "Knowing the process" versus knowing the map.

But... Last February my brother and I were tramping around the Desert National Wildlife Refuge north of Las Vegas. He could look at a topo, and project a hint of what would be there. He could read a map. In its proper place, the map was a powerful tool. In itself not a complete knowledge of what was being represented, but contributing a piece to the puzzle of understanding.

jd

Open access to state-collected geocode data

Making maps is a kind of networking activity. Or seeing networks is a kind of mapping activity. Accurate maps have been one of those state-sponsored activities critical to social development. One might argue that all geo-information is a public good (inasmuch as all intellectual activity is, in that it always takes place in a social context, i.e. interconnected with everyone else throughout time). If that is too much to accept, at lease state collected geodata is a public good -- after all you paid for it. Geodata -- the raw material of maps ("information with a spatial component" per the site mentioned below) -- is a source of power: where development is taking place, where the environment is being destroyed or thriving, where voters are and are not, etc. It is the quantitative data used to get a snapshot perspective of what is happening, towards developing effective strategies for change. Knowing the network as a first step to transforming the network.

The Open Geodata project is an effort to pry this public data out of the hands of just the state agencies (UK-focused for now it looks). In addition they sponsor projects to create copyright-free street-level maps, a kind of popular mapping initiative. The project is part of the Open Knowledge Foundation Network.

The Open Geodata project has a manifesto which they invite you to sign.

jd

Here's an interesting abstract: "Four correlates of complex behavioral networks: Differentiation, behavior, connectivity, and compartmentalization: Carving networks at their joints"

[The full paper is available here.]

The authors identify two properties of networks -- "selected"-ness and "behavioral". The first property is present if the network developed or evolved under "selective pressure" (e.g., as in "natural selection", where some features would tend to persist because of environmental or other pressures). The second property is present if the network demonstrates "network-level behaviors".

Per the authors, networks with these properties are similar in four respects:

Differentiation: The networks accommodate more types of structure through a variety of types of nodes

Behaviors: Networks demonstrate a greater repertoire of behaviors through an increased number of lower-level behavior types

Connectivity: The networks tend to maintain a consistent network diameter as they grow, via increased connectivity

Compartmentalization: For efficiency sake, the networks tend to become increasingly "parcellated"


jd

"...Merleau-Ponty said that we live 'out there among things,' in a kind of communion with the world: 'there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.' [apply appropriate gender transformations - jd] Through their descriptions of pre-reflective experience, then, the phenomenologists disclose human existence as a network of relations; our being is not locked up inside us, but is in fact spread throughout this web of worldly interactions in which our existence continually unfolds." -- Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. 2002. State University of New York Press. (p 11)

How to know the network?

"Network science" has been pitched as an alternative to "reductionist" science. That is, after dissecting processes into ever smaller units, and trying to understand the process by understanding the units, "knowing" the process still eluded scientists.

Now we are close to knowing just about everything there is to know about the pieces. [an absurd claim, no? - jd] But we are as far as we have ever been from understanding nature as a whole. Indeed the reassembly turned out to be much harder than scientists anticipated. [!] The reason is simple. Riding reductionism, we run into the hard wall of complexity. (Barabasi, Linked, p6)

"Network science" then comes to the rescue, revealing the laws of self-organization: per Barabasi, complexity has a "strict architecture", and its name is network.

One might argue though that this is just a deeper reductionism. Instead of just the parts -- now called "nodes", we add another abstract fundamental, the "link" to represent the richness of interconnection (reducing that to a bundle of discrete threads, each of which can be examined and presumably understood). Simple mechanics are enhanced to include another order of properties. Concerning ecology, a discipline that is heavy on interconnection, William Brinton writes "ecological perspectives within the sciences often only strengthen reductionistic directions, since they provide important details about relationships, which in turn help 'fine tune' the existing mechanical models." ("Environment as Data versus 'Being': Is Goetheanism possible in the West?", http://www.ifgene.org/brinton.htm)

In a harsh critique of "complexity", Steve Talbott argues that the more abstract theories and observations become, the more they become about nothing. "The problem with a scientific method based on maximum generalization and abstraction is that the more it succeeds -- that is, the more general and abstract its results become -- the shallower they tend to be. They tell us less and less about the particular contexts we wish to understand... In our drive toward generality and abstraction, we end up with what we ask for... We will get a theory that 'connects' diverse things, but in the process loses the things we are connecting." ("The Lure of Complexity", http://www.natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic7/complexity.htm)

How much simpler can the abstraction "network" become? The network diagram is to the actual process or phenomena as a stick figure is to a painting, or really, to the phenomena represented in the painting.

In general, modeling and abstraction are useful tools and part of the dialectical process of coming to understand phenomena, assuming that the researcher makes the return trip to the phenomena. Goethe's assertion that "the phenomenon is the theory" is a powerful insight. The abstraction is not the phenomenon.

A phenomenon cannot be understood as a "network". The "network" reduction is an abstraction. Certainly (I think) the "network" reduction, as part of a bigger project of isolation, focus, and then re-assembly, re-contexting and re-imagination, can lead to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Ultimately, though, "knowing the network" is a process of imaginative participation in the phenomenon. In part this is because the "complexity" of the interactions can only be grasped imaginatively, and in part because the network is a process in time, developing, changing, growing or dying or both, and likewise only graspable in the imagination. "Knowing the network" is a challenge that requires a holistic approach, a holistic scientific method.

Okay, so I am struggling through the ideas above. See The Nature Institute's website for more on what has been called a phenomenological approach to Nature, or holistic science, qualitative science, Goethean science, etc.

- jd

You don't need silicon to calculate poverty - The Clash

Levy-Bruhl, quoted in Owen Barfield's, Saving the Appearances (Wesleyan, 1988, pp 28-35): "... in other words, the connecting links of the representations are given, as a rule, in the representations themselves." (in reference to "primitive" cultures). Also, "The collective representations and interconnections which constitute such a mentality are governed by the law of participation..."

Barfield goes on to summarize "participation", or "original participation" as described by Levy-Bruhl and other anthropologists as an "awareness we no longer have, of an extra-sensory link between the percipient and the representations. This involves, not only that we think differently, but that the phenomena (collective representations) themselves are different."

But Barfield then corrects this idea: "[W]e do, in fact, still participate in the phenomena, though for the most part we do it unconsciously. We can only remind ourselves of that participation by beta-thinking [a sort of "thinking about thinking about representations" - jd] and we forget it as soon as we leave off."

On the other side of the negation of the negation is a "final participation", but more on that later.

Here is a very impressive website:

NOEMA.ORG

'NOEMA is a website devoted to culture-new technologies interrelations and influences. "Culture" also means "habits", "lifestyles", "communications", "art", "society", "economy", "media", "philosophy"..., while "new technologies" should be intended in a broader meaning than the digital realm.'

jd

"Power to the Edges: Trends and Opportunities in Online Civic Engagement" , by Jillaine Smith, Martin Kearns and Allison Fine, is a very good snapshot, taken May '05, of the state of online activism. Some of the key findings for organizations in the report:

-- design a "connectivity strategy" as opposed to a "technology strategy"

-- be "nimble and quick" with incorporating new opportunities provided by new technology

-- "push power to the edges": change the nature of the relationship with the people organization's seek to engage

-- build "network-centric leadership", the complement to "power to the edges", where the "edges" are able to contribute, collaborate, act, grow, lead etc.


jd

This is a posting that I did a while back to a now-defunct list, but it still is relevant. I have started a page of network properties, a catalog or glossary of sorts. Let me know of any additions or clarifications, the info below is the kind of stuff I am collecting.

Here's a link to a paper that looks at "different classes of small-world networks":

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/21/11149

The authors identify three kinds of small-world networks, based on the nature of the distribution of links. If I understand what they are saying, the cost of adding links (e.g., adding new routes to an airport vs new links to a website), and ongoing ability to add links ("aging", e.g., movie actor collaborations decay over time as an actor ages, also one might add an organization's ability to attract new members/connections -- I think this is another way of describing the "fitness" of nodes; new nodes may be very desirable to attach to, even though initially they do not have many links) will result in different kinds of small-world networks.

These two factors interfere w/ the "preferential attachment" phenomena of network growth (all things being equal, new nodes tend to attach to already well-connected nodes), resulting in the different classes of "small worlds".

jd

Network-centric Advocacy is a great blog by Marty Kearns devoted to "advocacy strategy for the age of connectivity." Okay it has a very generous write-up of the globalization and networks paper that I did, but regardless, this blog is an excellent collection of commentary and links by someone who, it is evident from the content, is deeply involved in the practice that he writes about. Marty is the co-founder and executive director of the Green Media Toolshed

Read the Network-Centric Advocacy Concept Paper by Marty, for background on the thought behind the blog:

The challenge to grassroots organizers and advocacy communication strategists is to match mobilizing and advocacy efforts with these new behaviors while also exploiting the advantages provided by emerging technologies and communications mediums. Network-centric advocacy is the adaptation of advocacy and traditional grassroots organizing to the age of connectivity.

...

An alternative to relying entirely on the current organizational-based advocacy model is to create a hybrid to supplement the strengths of organizations with the flexibility and viral potential of direct action. This hybrid is built on the availability of cheap transportation, free phone systems, new technology tools, secure online collaboration tools and exploiting service industry that was built for small businesses all for network campaigns. These are the characteristics of our age connectivity and they can now be used to “wire” together the movement or coalitions. Network-Centric Advocacy demands a simple set of actions to build and maintain connections among campaign assets (staff, volunteers, expertise, tools and organizations) so that campaign leaders can count on the response of the network in a predictable manner.

...

The adaptation of a networked approach will enable our staffs and volunteers to shift into campaigns where they make the most difference. The network will provide the best resources to promising initiatives that evolve out of the creativity from the field. Ideas will compete for help in a new marketplace that moves faster and learns quicker. The movement leadership will be more diverse and the campaigns will be increasingly difficult to counter and predict. Ultimately, the movement will see improvements in policy and stronger protections for the environment.

This is just a taste. The paper is a very practical, thoughtful consideration of both the practical problems of network-centric struggle, and the absolute necessity of solving those problems to move forward. And in particular, because it addresses the realm of idea-dessemination, it provides concrete ideas about the new tools and the need for a new doctrine in the battle for hearts and minds.

jd

Here's a very interesting posting about links:

The political sociology of golf in South Asia

jd

Space, time and interconnection bits:

the indivisibility of cause and effect

interpenetration of opposites

dynamic simultaneity

synchronicity

the compression of time and space, time dilation

"Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange -- of the means of communication and transport -- the annihilation of space by time -- becomes an extraordinary necessity for it." (Marx, Grundrisse)

'For Massey, "space-time" is a "configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity."'
(Drew Whitelegg, "The Big Squeeze: The Time and Space of Flight Attendants Since 9/11", citing Doreen Massey's 1994 Space, Place and Gender.

Network as an expression of juxtaposition and simultaneity, as counterposed to linear and temporal. Found on the Internet: "We are at a moment ... when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein" (Foucault, 1986; found in "How Space got its groove back: Geography and poststructuralism", lecture notes by Deborah Thien, University of Edinburgh).

Social relations as the interconnections within the social network. Some asymmetrical ones, in terms of social power: Property-propertyless, boss-worker, man-woman, white-black, urban-rural, etc. (Links have a direction property)

"This 'perceptual revolution' was the result of the fracturing of perspective into multiple viewing points in the early years of the 20th century. It creates a "new perceptual field" that is "'multiperspectival and environmental'" (Lowe 14) and where linear perspective comes to be replaced by the disorientation of navigation in simulated and multidimensional space. It creates a new way of looking appropriate to the speed, shape and space of the network as it exists in the instantaneousness of now time. By uniting space and time within the framework of vision, it also takes the onus off the 'female' as the guilty chaotic element within a binary, devalued (by the patriarchy) spatial system. And, in fact, rather than privileging the temporal aspects of the system, Doreen Massey argues that time is an emergent property of a network's spatial dimensions (268)." (from Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory by Carolyn G. Guertin, University of Toronto; emphases mine)

Today the Phil the mailman delivered a copy of Jack Hirschman's Arcanes, a French/English volume of nineteen or so of Jack's "Arcane" poems. Jack Hirschman is a great soul, poet, artist and revolutionary, a case of the "prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house" in that he is better known, received, appreciated, or so it seems, in Europe that in the U.S. Here are a couple of links to Jack's poetry:

"Poetry for a New America"
Il Narratore (includes some audio files)

Anyway, in the introduction to Arcanes by Gilles Vachon, something leaped out at me. Vachon identifies "arcane" as coming from the Qabalah tradition (here's my rough translation):

"The 'arcanization' is a fundamental enterprise of the Zohar (a remarkable 13th century mystical text by Moses of Leon), which affirms the principle: divine secrets are found in all texts and in each letter of the Bible. One knows that this position on symbolic writing interested many investigators of the spirit, from de Lessing to Tzara, with Netwon, Kafka, Borges and Andre Breton in between... [and this part is sketchy] (Recall that Jacques Derrida owed to the Kabbalah many of his intuitions about textuality and multiple meanings (?plurivocité?), that Jack Hirschman and others discovered, and that, like Maurice Blanchot, were inspired by the vision of symbols and textual interpretations. [il en a été conforté dans sa vision des symboles et son herméneutics])

(In the mystical Kabbalah/Qabalah tradition, meaning is assigned to each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Further, numeric values are assigned to letters, so that words have a numeric value, and so some added meaning may be seen to exist between words of the same numeric value. Each letter is attributed to one of the 22 lines, or paths, connecting the 10 Sephiroth on the mnemonic Tree of Life (a kind of spiritual network diagram, with Tiphareth, the central sixth Sephiroth, as a superconnector or hub). Each letter has also been attributed to one of the 22 Major Arcana or Trumps of Tarot. Per Regardie, Cordavero describes the Sephiroth as "vessels of force or categorical ideas through which the consciousness of the universe expresses itself".)

Jack wrote an essay in 1971 called Kabbal Surrealism "trying to put together the many strains of French Surrealism, Negritude, North American poetics and politics, along with the sort of hip kabbalism I was involved with" at the time.

What struck me was this idea of divine or inspired writing not being specific to Hebrew or the Bible, but to any inspired writer, to the artist. The process of conveying meaning via text, where ideas are stored in ink-on-page, to be re-created in the mind of the reader, with levels of meaning, and meanings that may be hidden on first or second or fiftieth reading, and then revealed not because you now have the secret decoder ring, but because you understand things differently, "the understanding of a person is conditioned by his or her capacity to understand" (from "The Food of Paradise", in Indries Shah's Tales of the Dervishes). The power of poetry. For the reader, diving through the text, reaching that which inspires, and being inspired thereby.

Well in writing this down the though doesn't sound so striking perhaps, or so new as it seemed at the time it popped up in my brain.

From an interview w/ Jack that appeared in the wonderful journal Left Curve:

Poetry is ultimately what belongs to all. That is, everyone is a poet. People still reject that idea only because they have never lived in the historical conditions where that truth is realized. That's one of the reasons I struggle for the material transformation of society, to bring about that spiritual consciousness of the fact that everyone is a poet. In addition, poetry is the expression that carries within its moment much more than that moment, pointing ever toward a future through its rhythmic cries and revealed heartbeats. (from Interview with Jack Hirschman by Marco Nieli)

In a testament to the power of ideas, here's this description of the Zohar:

Moses Deleon's discovery generally went unnoticed by the world. But it was a significant turning point for mankind, as the Light of the Zohar radiated into the world for the first time in history... [T]he energy emanating from its mystical text sparked the collective unconscious of a generation. The power of the Zohar propelled the world out of the Dark Ages. (from the Kabbalah Centre website)

Which is a way to see Jack's poems.

(Jack and David Meltner are giving a talk on the Kabbalah at City Lights in San Francisco, June 9, 2005)

jd

"And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language' -- this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?" - Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction.

Goethean science / holistic science

"Goethean science" is a holistic approach to science (as opposed to analytical and reductionist), named such because of the method associated with Goethe and described in his science writings. The Goethean approach to the total process overlaps with the dialectical approach, of seeing processes not as a collection of parts, but as relationships and interconnections.

Here is a quote from Henri Bortoft's book, The Wholeness of Nature (subtitled "Goethe's way toward a science of conscious participation in Nature"), Lindisfarne Books, 1996.

"[A] relationship cannot be experienced as such in the analytical mode of consciousness. Since in this mode it is the elements which are related that stand out in experience, the relationship itself can only seem to be a shadowy abstraction to the intellectual mind. The perception of a relationship as such would require a simultaneous perception of the whole, and hence the restructuring of consciousness into the holistic mode... The perception of a necessary connection is the perception of a relationship as a real factor in the phenomenon, instead of being only a mental abstraction added on to what is experienced by the senses. The reality of a relationship, the necessity of a connection, is not experienced as such either by the senses alone or by the intellectual mind. Hence any attempt to understand this reality in terms of these faculties is bound to find that it vanishes from the phenomenon itself and appears to be only a subjective belief." (99)

[Note: My criticism of at least this part of Bortoft's book is that he does not say how or why there is a necessary connection in the phenomenon he cites as examples, like certain structures in mammals, only that there is such a thing.]

The Goethean approach is seen as a way around Hume's assertion that, because there is no sense impression from which necessary connection can be derived, "necessary connections" do not exist. For Hume, two events appeared "conjoined" (or in "constant conjunction") and that was it -- nothing "necessary" or necessarily "connected" about them, only something "habitually" seen, "contingent correlations".

I don’t see what Hume's problems was -- an experimentally repeatable phenomenon given the same conditions or field of operation, seems enough to perceive or know the necessary connection. As Engels wrote (in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy):

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable "thing-in-itself". The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such "things-in-themselves" until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the "thing-in-itself" became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar.

Setting aside Engels' sense of "things for us" and "making it serve our purposes", and the sort of objectification and alienation from nature that it implies, there are two methods here of apprehending "necessary connection". On the one hand, a Goethean, method arising out of non-analytic mental activity -- holistic, right-brain, intuited apprehension. On the other, a method arising from interacting with matter (call it "practice", "labor" or "production"; or "fiddling", "experimenting", or "hacking").

My interest in "necessary connection" has to do with "laws" as "necessary connections", and the bundle of laws present in a phenomenon (or network) is the law system. And the law system determines the behaviors, the nature of the network.

Although "network" sounds so schematic and technical.

jd

Here's a link to the paper that I am giving at the Global Studies Association meeting in Knoxville tomorrow (5/13/05) on networks and globalization:

"Networks and globalization" (html) / (pdf)

jd

Here are a couple of other online resources, these on economics and networks:

Economics of Networks (This is the website of Nicholas Economides at the Stern School of Business, New York University.


Network Economics series from the Social Science Research Network (link copied from the "Economics of Networks" site).

jd

Here's a link to an interesting discussion between writer Joline Blais and artist Jon Ippolito on "Evaluating Collaborative Work, Interauthorship, Open Content".

jd

I realize this is old news, but the story is illustrative of (1) the vulnerability of modern systems to a network-based offensive strategy and (2) another way that electronics-based society, or at least a capitalist one, leads towards the police(d) state.

Dissertation Could Be Security Threat: Student's Maps Illustrate Concerns About Public Information By Laura Blumenfeld, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, July 8, 2003; Page A01.

For his geography dissertation, George Mason U. grad student Sean Gorman mapped the businesses and industry, and overlayed them with the fiber-optic networks that connect them. Although based on publicly available information, the work assembles in one place a map to obvious places to snip-snip and shut down sections of the economy. "For this, Gorman has become part of an expanding field of researchers whose work is coming under scrutiny for national security reasons. His story illustrates new ripples in the old tension between an open society and a secure society."

jd