Re: MD Diversity and Coherence.
From: Jim Ledbury (jim.ledbury@dsl.pipex.com)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 11:29:38 GMT
Next message: Platt Holden: "Re: MD religious content & necessity of necessity"
Hi Mark.
Thanks for your reply
My use of the
term severe was intuition, and i liked it because it
reminded me of laser light - and laser light was used as an analogy in
ZMM for the extreme rational ability of Phaedrus.
Well a lot of linguistic aesthetics is down to usage and the
associations that we would make with a word in an unfamiliar
circumstance, and also simple euphony (don't get me started on the use
of 'farther' for 'further'! :-) ). But the circumstances I would
generally associate 'severe' with are:
- severe drought (a bad one)
- severe weather (extreme - hurricanes and so forth)
- severe manner (stern, demanding, unkindly)
- severe illness (life-threatening)
I'm sure you get the drift!
Perhaps 'intense' would be a suitable substitution? We can have
'intense drought' and 'intense manner' , but also 'intense
concentration', 'intense rapture'.
Mark:
I also have no
problems with Chaos or Complexity theory. However, i do
not pretend to have a thorough understanding, and i do not wish to
adopt a trendy mantle! But i feel these areas of scientific enquiry
introduce it closer to aesthetics, and that is very intriguing!
I wasn't being entirely serious. :-) I'm anti-borrowing language for
the sake of it. For starters, that is what junk science does.
Anything that goes around covering itself with the shawls of science to
simply try to evince some degree of intellectual respect will be shot
down in the junk limiting protocols, no matter how good the underlying
idea.
However we should actually seek parallels, especially physical, natural
(non-human) ones in attempting to show quality as a universial and not
simply a goal limited to the neurochemistry of the human brain, as you
were showing in discussions with regard to coherence in different
domains before I joined MD.
I note that some physicists are turning to modelling social behaviour.
The outcome should be interesting: not least it will help us puncture
some precious illusions we have about ourselves. But it should also
provide fertile ground for MoQ because it is dealing with interface of
the quantifiable and (statistically) reproducible and actual human
experience.
One physical parallel that springs to mind with the resonance analogy
is the electronic engineers' Q-factor, which is defined as the "fill
width width at half maximum", that is the amount which a radio tuning
circuit can be adjusted so that the output response is at least half
its maximum value. The Q-factor is important because it also indicates
how well a tuning circuit will pick out a given frequency from all the
others, i.e. the Q-factor indicates the sharpness of resonance.
Naively, one might think that the best circuits are those with the
highest Q-factor. Certainly these will respond best to a single
frequency. However any information bearing signal frequency will in
fact be a combinination of frequencies which requires some width to the
resonance (bandwidth). The whole thing is a compromise between
maximizing the information you can stuff down the channel and ensuring
that the signal is sufficiently distinct from other signals and
background noise. In this case the ambivalent aspect of diversity is
apparent. No diversity means that that the information is pretty much
limited to signal on or off. Too much diversity, and the signal is
broadened beyond the point of utility. Of coarse we can up the
information carrying capacity of the signal by changing to a different
channel wich supports a higher bandwidth (more information you can
squeeze down the line per unit time). But then a multinational media
organisation outbids everyone and fills it with mindless music which
takes up most of the newfound information carrying capacity (junk
diversity #1) or it becomes the conduit for virus-spread spam mail
(junk diversity #2) .
I'm not quite sure where this analogy leads. Maybe it's to dicuss the
precision of the sweet spot with regard to quality. The sweetness the
spot would perhaps correpsond to a very high Q-factor. This is
appropriate to an acute adaption/degree of coherence where the need to
deal with a large amount of diverse information is small. It's cutting
down the the things you need to deal with to a minimum so that you can
devote yourself to cohering with the relevant incoming quality. It's
appropriate in sport, in music, in art, in religion, ... in
intellectual analysis in fact. In fact we could be said to engage in
these activities precisely because of the high Q-factor (pun
intended). However for dealing with a wide degree of incident
qualities we have to drop down from this fine resonance. We have to be
alert to a lot more, but in doing so we lose the fine response. When
we need the fine response, we concentrate, remove distractions.
However in dealing with the real world as opposed to the ideal world,
the profane rather than the sacred we have to loose the fine tuning.
But it would be a mistake to say that we needed to adapt our tuning so
that we always act on high Q-factor. This is because we could only
operate in specialised circumstances if we did. The ability to
diversify is pragmatic and requires that a low Q-filter exists so that
we can react to a lot of different information. What we need is to
recognise the necessity of switching between low Q-filter and high
Q-filter. In fact certain analogies become plain: the operation of
secular society versus the operation of a religious community. The
civil observance of law in wider society versus discipline appropriate
to the military.
I might seem that diversity is contrary to what has been said with
regard to coherence before, in that in the resonance case we need to
broaden the response to cope with diversity (lower Q-factor). It's
just that high-Q-factor situations are necessarily specialised and
cannot cope with all possible circumstances. Too low a Q-factor,
however, and one is not capable of responding at all. I guess the
ability to diversify is the quality of 'health'.
Resonance also feeds back into biodiversity again. In nature there is
a lot of linking of annual, tidal, daily and biological cycles, and
their ability to survive climatic change is under much study.
I sense tangential digression on my part, so I'll leave it for the mo'
All the best.
Jim.
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5
: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 11:31:50 GMT