Notes as LionKimbro investigates.

It appears to be a planear MetaPhysics of the HiveMind.

You may find it helpful to skip to the bottom, “Appendix A,” and reading the summary there, before reading the full article- at the very least, you’ll have a point of reference for the words “horizontal” and “vertical.”

The layers go like so:

On the last layer, the author makes an interesting observation: “Solution can rarely be rationally designed.” (Something I, LionKimbro, agree with.)

A table (or better, a diagram) would actually be really nice here.

The paper also talks about future studies within the context of this model.

See Also

[[tag:notes]] [[tag:analysis]] [[tag:metaphysics]] [[tag:model]] [[tag:theory]] [[tag:planes]] [[tag:society]]


I get what he’s talking about; I have intuited roughly the thing he’s intuiting. I can use this language. I like it. It gives some skeletal form to hang thinking. I like it.

I promise to create a diagram for this page.

I think with “focus on the genealogy of the problem”, Sohail Inayatullah is saying to look back across the history of a problem. What elements is it born of? And what are those elements born of? etc. (I am not actually sure, though, and I think I’ll email him and see what he has to say.)

When you create that diagram, please include what he called the “horizontal” factors- “problem,” “solution,” “media,” and so on. (Whatever the were.)

I suspect it’ll mainly be a table.

(side note: I also think the idea about “rational design” is interesting. I was just talking to a friend about how social network analysis shows us that the actual structure of communication and co-workign in human systems rarely macthes the way that people try to preplan them. Same thing with IT systems. Probably will also apply to AI as it gets more powerful.)

I received a reply from Sohail Inayatullah, the creator of the CLA model. I asked him if he could clarify what he meant by the “geneaology of the problem”:

It is important to trace the genealogy of any issue, not its history per se, but its genealogy - how particular definitions have become hegemonic. As we develop alternative futures, we can use the definitions, the possibilities that did not result to develop the alternative futures.

I also focus on genealogy as a way to explore patterns - here moving toward macrohistory. Once, workshop groups, can see that a particular issue has changed over time, then they are more open to seeing that the future can be different.

In my current work, I focus on Hal and Sidra Stone’s disowned self, asking which future is disowned as we move toward our preferred future. Then I have groups name the disowned future. The third scenario integrated the preferred and the disowned.

The link with CLA is often the disowned future of one group is the owned future of another stakeholder. Thus, having dialogue between stakeholders and worldviews deepens understanding of how others create the future, and how futures can be different

Having read some of Inayatullah’s work, I know that he is deeply tied with futures studies. So, I think his idea of looking at the “geneaology” of the issue, based on what he wrote above, is to find the “disowned” futures and understand them, and possibly even use them to develop alternative futures. He also says that this is a way to broaden the multi-perspective view.

(On a related note, I have a friend named Charles Cameron that has invented a way of analayzing human problems, that he calls HipBoneAnalytics? (see: HipBone Analytics). His ideas are based on Herman Hesse’s novel “Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game)”. it is a qualitative way at looking at complicated problems, based upon diagrammatic reasoning. I bring up HipBoneAnalytics? because mostly because it might be one useful way to look at the “geneaology” of the issue. And, it might be a way to make it more understandable to more people through diagrammatic reasoning.)

(still committed to create a diagram for this page :))

DavidBrin? and Sheldon Brown talked about art and frames and discourse in ways that reminded me of the CausalLayeredAnalysis, in a (long) video on Google TechTalks that pulls together many of the things we talk about on this wiki. (Thanks to LukeStanley for pointing it out to me.)

Basically, they say that art is a mechanism for seeing the universal ZeitGeist in aesthetic particulars of our world. They say that art is persuasive without argument, and that it expresses our assumptions and our tensions.

Define external redirect: DavidBrin HipBoneAnalytics