@skreutzer
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Want to add something to the problems of linear audio as I can’t modify the previous post any more: some misunderstandings occur simply because of bad audio quality, distraction, pronunciation, mishearing, etc., and if live, one can’t rewind.
Reply to #328.
Hallo Heidi,
just to be very clear, for me, it’s not about the money, I just don’t want to waste it for limited, restrictive licenses, that’s all. Even getting limited, restrictive licenses + software gratis is too expensive as a dependency (vendor dictates what I can and can’t do or remove the capability entirely), for security (blindly-trust-me without a way to check, which is where the viruses come from), etc. You confirm that yourself by saying that Google Hangouts went bad, and now you’re stuck, neither you nor anybody else can fix it no matter how technically able we are or no matter what amount of money we would like to throw at it. I find (my) lifetime just too scarce and therefore valuable to invest and subsequently waste it on things that can’t improve, degenerate again (for artificial, stupid reasons), simply disappear or can be taken away.
Even with that out of the way, I really don’t like the linearity of voice/video, which is why I don’t use phones and don’t have a cellphone/smartphone. Time zones and personal schedules don’t easily match, discussions need to branch off in in more ways than the linearity allows (otherwise there’s a loss of potential, and it’s very time consuming/inefficient), and as others expect a right to call their peers at any time, I want to retain the right to not be called at times without the need to explain or excuse for it. There are ways to solve all of this, but nobody works on this, including this group.
So what are I’m missing out on? I can listen to the recordings (non-live, which means at times I do have the time), I only need to be in the call if I have to say something. What would I want to say? A lot of things that don’t fit into linearity, then, some of my stuff is out already and why repeat it all, especially as the protocol is to just be present and don’t jump on every potentially confused thinking one would want to discuss in much greater detail, etc. Is it about what the conversations might lead to? Sure, projects were started and actions taken without taking my suggestions into account, but that’s perfectly fine, in my mind. Given the choice of either doing the work myself or first invest many hours in a contest for airtime, face a lot of objections, lack of interest or understanding and then having to do the work myself anyway, what do you think makes more sense? For sure I get something out of the recorded conversations and written pieces, but they also come at a cost in time, mental capacity, attention, moreso when deeply considering the statements and replying.
> We others are not able to write our own software […] So I am not a tech freak although all the tech I am using I have to do myself…
There’s my main interest in following the GCC group, because there’s a latent connection to Douglas Engelbart. One of his points was bootstrapping/co-evolution of the technology together with the social, human, methodological conventions/interests/skills of the user(s), and I’m quite aware that the latter is important in some sense too, it should not be easily dismissed with all focus going to the technological side. On the other hand, it would be foolish to just focus on the human systems side, because the hard tech reality doesn’t comply with wishful thinking. The computer is a blank canvas on which we can make possible whatever we can imagine, but all of it comes with an investment of time and/or money, and our wishes might not translate 1:1 to what is possible. For example, ease of use might only enable results that are relatively easy/primitive, it might not help with complex/difficult tasks, we might not be able to get rid of experts and specialized service providers by replacing them with a single button to push. And how would you even model/handle the more social, human, soft aspects? Engaging in such an investigation would likely not reduce the time investment in looking at technological and human stuff, but increase it a lot, hopefully once and for all, to end up with systems that are designed to save that time for every future use case, if done properly. So I don’t see those things as either/or, but both together. I just continue to fail to find alignment in other people on several key points, but can’t see or weren’t convinced yet how those values/principles can be respected by implementing solutions in another way. Not too bad, what each of us can still do is solving his/her own problems, we’ll eventually get to somewhere, it’s just incredibly slow. Enbelbart, realizing the complexity and urgency of our world problems, suggested that there ought to be a way to exponentially improve our human and tool systems (also time-wise) if we want to stand a chance, but the reality might be that we’re not able to, as humans.
Hi Heidi,
thanks for the recommendations, I want to look into them in the next few weeks. Even books are not an issue as I read them (slowly) on the train/bus or while waiting for one. It’s a little bit lame to invoke Gödel incompleteness theorems, but its pretty apparent that no single formal system can cover everything and still be correct, so an integral view can glue different systems together, even where they formally contradict each other. Not that it is necessarily the solution for everything, but it’s way better than a single rigid model, but in terms of tools to approach complexity, I’m not aware if there is something better available.
My trouble with the live GCC conversations is that I refuse to use proprietary software as a libre-free software activist to avoid dependencies and maintain sovereignty over my own computing. While Zoom has a version for GNU/Linux, it certainly won’t run on my machines as they’re installed with only 100% libre-licensed distributions, and even if it would run without proprietary software package dependencies, Zoom itself is restrictively licensed, so I don’t see why Zoom should be allowed to take the capability away from me again, deny me the ability to adjust the software to my own needs (including removal of malware and other nasty anti-features) or share the client/server with friends, neighbors and strangers (self-host the server part or select from a broad range of providers). Alternatively, I have Ekiga softphone, but that’s not what you guys use, and under some circumstances, I can use online video-telephony via their web client as this is now possible with the open HTML5 standard and doesn’t need Adobe Flash any more, just to do something as simple as streaming a video+audio feed.
Because of this, I’m pretty much out of the GCC conversations and activities, but maybe for good as I too understand that you are people of the telephone age. To me, it’s absolutely horrible to engage in a shouting contest with limited airtime, as time is linear and the participants, thoughts and things to talk about multiply exponentially. Initially I hoped that based on Engelbart’s ideas, some improvement would be done, but it became quite clear that this group isn’t about that, so I’m looking more at the written material published on the more open web (excluding YouTube comments and Facebook), which is blogs, sites, this forum.
I’m on CEST/MESZ (currently GMT/UTC+2), Germany.
Greetings,
StephanHi Heidi,
I’m Stephan Kreutzer, account name is usually skreutzer according to Unix/Linux user name convention to avoid name collisions as I was able to register skreutzer.de in the global domain name address book 10 years ago. I also assumed that you want to be called Heidi, because why else give this additional (nick)name?
I didn’t refrain from calling it an “ism” because I know that quite some people are opposed to it, wonder if they don’t like “dogmas” or “ideology”, but quite frankly, they can’t bind their shoes without it, and binding them or thinking that they need to be bound is an “ism” as well as leaving the shoelaces waggling around. I guess integral theory is NOT the same as all the other, earlier theories, and if it includes the other ones, then the other ones aren’t already integral, and as I know other theories (some group theory got applied in this explaination attempt), they are different from each other, that’s why there’s some othering on my side, they have their own names for a reason.
1. I never had a formal introduction to systems theory, I only read about cybernetics once and work daily with human-made computer systems, so I thought that the 4 different levels/perspectives would be systems as well and include more sub-systems, and having the 4 of them is a system too as they certainly interact with each other, so maybe I’m more an integralist than a system thinker, especially as I don’t care much about modelling feedback loops for they seem to be a little bit too primitive/simplistic to reflect the complexity at hand. To frame it even more, identifying “systems” could be just another tool like identifying “topics” or identifying “time” is, tools that help us to navigate/deal with complexity.
2. Do these stages define themselves or are they pre-defined? Are the stages directed? Just curious.
3. Agree. Profane, ugly, un-enlightened, un-spiritual things have their place too even if we don’t like them/it, needs to be acknowledged and properly encountered I guess, it’s a different quality of enlightenment/spirituality to meet it adequately/appropriately, not just being enlightened in isolation, an end in itself, a state/feeling to finally rest in. I mean, who knows, why couldn’t it turn out to be deeply shattering/unresting? But maybe you wanted to make a different point, I can only share my limited glimpse 😉
Listening to the GCC conversations made me realize that the problems are truly systemic, leading to less hope instead of more, as far as I’m concerned. At least I now have to look more into integral theory, and discovered your blog now and the other sites and even the webcasts, to catch up eventually. I don’t know to what extend, but I can work with WordPress in some ways and maybe online audio/video one day, just to approach/consume the masses of created material a little bit more conveniently. We’ll see 🙂
Hi Heidi,
where do you recognize the integralism, is it in the consciousness or topic part or both? I wasn’t aware of integral theory, but recently looked it up because you mentioned it several times in the recordings of the conversation, so I don’t know a lot about it, but very broadly speaking (at the risk of hijacking this thread), is it the notion that everything is connected/related somehow, is that in a single, specific way not yet really discovered/understood, or all sorts of different metrics and do you think and/or does the theory allow two things to exist that are completely unrelated and don’t affect each other in any way at all? Do those questions make sense?
I thought some more about topics and would describe them now as a tool for broad grouping of things with somewhat vague boundaries, so some things can be added/included and also removed/excluded again if it turns out that they’re not really connected to the subject of the topic, but did just appear to be. I also put the text on my blog in order to develop it some more, a collection of “tools” for/by the practitioners of system theory, such as computer programmers. Another tool would be “time”, I think I wrote an initial piece on it but can’t find it any more. Just had an encounter how “time” works on a computer, it really doesn’t exist 😉
I’ve found and listened to several moments by now that are pretty discouraging, but what follows from 53:12 of 20180916 GCC Sunday Unblocking is incredibly scary! Being just an individual as well, I decide to not to play as the only reasonable move. Let’s talk again when you’ve discovered what the problems are – not to rescue anything at an even later stage, but to start over.
Time is the distance things can move, depending on the nature of energy and how it wants to balance. There is only the always-present of the state of things, and if we let energies move, that’s how the only future becomes reality/present, and the “past” is a certain present of states we can’t get to again (not “back”, but to it a second time) because the current, present arrangement of states of energies doesn’t let us.
Hi Alex,
Andrew mentioned Allan Combs’ consciousness theory, and in response to Harry, I tried to ask the question from systems theory if something can exist that’s not a system/structure, if consciousness is too a system/structure and therefore would be not outside of systems thinking, as if systems thinking would be limited to only a few topics or insufficient as a tool to look at everything, including consciousness. There are other universal things like graphs or networks (which are as well systems/structures, it’s probably different names for the same thing/tool/perspective/interpretation), how would one explain that consciousness is not a graph/network? Same with “topic”?
This topic seems to be hidden/invisible in the Forum overview. Activity -> General Discussions doesn’t lead to the Forum overview, so without a link to go there (to my awareness), it’s unlikely that people will find topics in other forums than “General Discussions”, so no engagement and structuring to expect there.
My interpretation, maybe arriving at Einstein or not: there’s energy, and energy moves stuff (trying to balance itself, colliding, etc.). Those movements are irreversible because the process is chaotic and complex, you can’t get things back into place that want to diverge and found new stable states except with incredible amounts of energy, that then would lack elsewhere and exceed the initial diverging energy, so it’s not the same anyway because undoing time (the movement of things), doing the events/processes in reverse, wouldn’t need the same amount of energy, but more, so it wouldn’t be the same. So with things happening as result of reactions, how they develop depends a whole lot on random chaos and complexity, so you can’t all of them back into reverse movement in the exact same way. Additionally, we lack the control of influencing all those movements and complex micro and macro happenings/developments, additionally as they’re all result of what happened/developed before, so at some point there might be one minor tiny thing we can’t influence (in practice because of being bound to developments of energies ourselves). So this, in my mind, is why time is one-way, why we can’t travel back. As long as things move, there is “time” as we can identify a previous and a later state. If energies stop to exist or balance themselves, things wouldn’t move any more and we would be completely unable to tell if or how much time has been passed, so we can ask if time exists at all. So what time actually, really is, as far as we’re concerned, is the speed of light, how a particle that’s barely matter and on the convergence to wave and energy (moving without loss of energy? Didn’t think too much about it for this short thought dump) can move the fastest we know and can imagine, and the slowest Planck time where we can’t observe any movement below it, because movement or energy (state) changes below that probably don’t happen or are insignificant in terms of the “grid” of physical matter, where the most atomic physical matter element breaks down into it’s always-shivering “noise” Heisenberg/Schrödinger quants, where we’re probably back at energy that because of it’s existence/presence comprises pieces of physical matter that preserve themselves instead of collapsing and falling apart. Like 0 Kelvin, if there’s no energy/heat, things/time stands still as there is no movement or change in state, you can’t move less than not moving. If the movement becomes too much, matter breaks apart by either increasing resistance or by exiting the state of matter and entering wave/energy forms. So space, matter, time and energy might be pretty much the same or closely interrelated, which is why black holes are interesting as instances where the “grid” collapsed, because as we were able to discover/observe one, their existence might teach us a whole lot about the question what time is or might be, because they’re also eating the light for interesting reasons.
Therefore, I wonder if time as such exists at all, it might only be a matter of fact or effect as a result because some energy things are going on, but we could imagine worlds or places where no energy exists (let’s have a look at the universe…, just saying…) or where things don’t move, or where things/energies behave in ways that are entirely different than what we know (or maybe matter that’s not based on energy?). Time doesn’t really exist except for the observation that we didn’t find or know about something without it (our ability to observe anything means that we’re present as matter comprised or a result of energy, which means that observing the time-/energy-less instance might be a little hard, if not impossible, if it exists or can exist, timelessness, but that means that there can’t be energy- and matterlessness that leads to other interesting implications), so time “exists” or we have the impression as a result of energy being existent/present.
- The Truman Show
I can trick my way into editing the initial topic post, but not into editing replies, so here’s another reply to myself: if there’s somebody in this group who has/sees those problems and is serious about working on it for solving/fixing the issues (not just talk), as long as the work isn’t a result of collaboration (for full control of the author over legal permissions), we could look into doing something within or outside of the GCC context, if there’s no objection about the slowness and tediousness of the progress, but the hope is that it eventually leads somewhere in contrast to the artifacts that probably are lost by now.
Allan Coombs talks about consciousness and we do too, so it’s certainly a topic, but does consciousness itself have a structure, can we even know that it exists? Surely it exists, because we made it a topic, so it exists because we assigned/identified a structure of what consciousness is or might be and what it isn’t and probably might not be, so it has at least one structure (ours, as a topic or several topics, at least), so we’re back at wondering if things without structure can exist (again, not in terms of if they actually, really exist or actually/really because of us, or only virtually or any of that, but existence as something we can learn and talk about in opposition to things that may or may not exist, but about which we can’t talk or gain any knowledge because of the lack of observable structure, including our own made-up structures to talk/think about things that didn’t exist for us before, so we can say that we don’t know about the existence of anything without structure, except unstructuredness itself potentially, if it actually or virtually exists, but that might be the only unstructured thing we can ever talk/learn about).
Birds are structures and a topic, flying requires structures and is a topic, branch is a structure, particles are a structure and waves as well. A single or particular bird in full flight probably doesn’t justify to be a whole topic in itself, or who cares about that? As soon as somebody cares about it, it surely can be made a topic.
I’m not sure if we can reasonably describe something that has no structure, or if things without structure can or do exist, but I’m curious how we could approach such a notion.
I don’t know anything about Allan Coombs, but consciousness might be something that’s not a structure, and we could discuss if consciousness requires host structure(s), but here we’re back again at the problem that we can’t properly talk about it because the lack of structure makes it hard to prove it’s existence. Not that things that potentially exist or don’t exist can’t exist if we don’t find their structure, but in absence of finding their structure, one can easily claim that they do exist as well as don’t exist, which may or may not have influence over their real existence [1], but what’s certain is the fact that we can’t easily talk about it for that particular reason.
Does this make sense?
[1] To avoid confusion on that particular statement: one can bring things into existence by simply claiming that they exist, or by introducing structure to something that was unstructured before (so it exists in or by or because of the structure), and we can debate if they really exist, but they’re not less or more existent than we are. If they have a consciousness is a different question, but even that can’t be easily dismissed for the things we otherwise would be most sure that they don’t exist and aren’t real. A prime example could be a fictional character in a book or movie, is he/she more or less real/existent than, let’s say, “Shakespeare”, or you and me?
