The Twinkling Network:
Are ideas the product of a constantly changing network? by Daniel Eastwell

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1. Introduction and Conclusion?

A hypertext essay's form is dependent on the choices the reader makes. It's easy to have an introduction, but the onus is on the author to structure the essay so that if the reader leaves at any point, or navigates in any fashion, the thesis is maintained.

The thesis emerges for the reader as a holistic, gestalt entity, based not only on the texts the reader chooses to read, but also upon the ideas they bring to the text.

I hope to use the hypertext form to echo my thesis. I'd like to express that an idea is never fixed or 'present': it constantly changes. It's the 'interactions' the reader has that determine, to a certain extent, the nature of the essay. Even if the course taken through the essay is meandering and without a real 'end', the form holds the thesis: that ideas, even though constantly changing, are the result of a structure and system that maintain the 'nature' of the idea.

I hope to show that ideas are formed from interactions: with a text, with a present cognitive state; with anything or anybody else.

A person may form their ideas from reading, conversations, television, advertising, the notes they make and even their environment. I hope to show that through these interactions, there can be no concluding an idea, or an essay. All interactions change the person (not greatly; not arbitrarily) based on the fact that thoughts are had.

This will be a 'recursive' process: the thoughts the person has will affect any further thoughts they have. The reader, by the end of a text, may have mentally, and may also have physically, referred to other texts, interacted with other people and their environment.

This recursive process should be present in reading this essay, as the reader leaps around the text (within its limits) and constructs, hopefully, the same bounded set of meaning, whilst allowing a wide and ever-changing range of interpretation, or understanding.

If ideas arise through recursive interaction, then the thesis of this essay should hang around like a buzzing ideas network, never completed, fed back into the environment and fed back again to the reader. This essay will also 'feed-forward' into the CFAP Final Year Show 2004, through links made from within the text to other works, and from any associations made.

2. Glossary

A priori

A statement or set of circumstances that is knowable without direct experience in the world.

Autonomous

Self-contained. Used here to imply an object or concept which has a limited and possibly fixed meaning. See also Platonism.

Autopoiesis

“Self-production or self-maintenance. The ability to maintain a bounded form despite a flow of material occurring. [...] including natural phenomena like Jupiter's Red Spot.” (Lucas, glossary.htm)

Maturana and Varela define autopoiesis as:

“a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components that: (i) through their interactions and transformations continously regenerate the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realizations as such a network.” (Maturana and Varela, p.79)

A more helpful definition might be this, from Tom Quick's website: “a system is Autopoietic if the bits and pieces of which it is composed interact with each other in such a way as to continually produce and maintain that set of bits and pieces and the relationships between them.”

Cognitive

Deriving from mental processes.

Culture

The product of interactions in a societal network. For example, culture in the art world is what Sevänen calls “a Habermasian [...] special cultural system. This system includes works of art and artistic techniques” (p87).

These may come about as a result of the current situation of all elements within the network. These elements may include the artists' current reading, ideas, research, sketches (in whatever medium). See also Society.

Determinism

The idea that all events are purposely caused, by a sequence of prior events.

Emergent

Emergence is a key term meaning: “system properties that are not evident from those of the parts. A higher level phenomena, that cannot be reduced to that of the simpler constituents and needs new concepts to be introduced. This property is neither simply an aggregate one, nor epiphenomenal¹. ” (Lucas, glossary.htm) It is used to describe properties or behaviours of a system that you would not expect from the individual parts that comprise it.

Ideas

Concepts that exist (not necessarily through language) in the mind and embodied in society and the environment and that arise and maintain from a process of interaction (see below).

Interaction

Any process connecting the individual to the environment and back again – be it sensual, through language or writing or indirect human interaction through created objects (e.g. Art).

Network

An illustrative or physical method of linking components of a system. See also System.

Platonism

“The view taken especially from the middle dialogues of Plato that abstract objects, such as those of mathematics, or concepts such as the concept of number or justice, are real, independent, timeless, and objective entities.” (Blackburn)

Recursion

“'Recursive' is used to reflect an ongoing cycle, where each structural state of [a] system arises as a result of the cumulative effects of all the previous interactions.” (Quick)

Self Organisation

“[The] ability to create structure without any external pressures, an emergent property of the system.” (Lucas, glossary.htm) See also emergent. It is used to describe systems that create their form from their own actions.

Set

A group of elements, not necessarily mutually linked.

Structure

A set of connected components. These need not be static, such as bricks in a building, nor tangible, such as words in a language. See also System.

System

A set of interacting components. These need not be physically manifested, situated in one place, or exclusive to one system. These could be virtual, and distributed, such as the knowledge: 'how to hammer in a nail', which is, not exclusively, in many minds and is, not exclusively, a component of the system: 'boat-building'.

Society

The actors in, and the interactions of, a cultural system. As Sevänen says: “by the concept of 'art as a system' we may mean the art world or the institutions and practices which accompany the production, mediation, distribution, reception and criticism of art. In this sense, we mean by 'art as a system' the whole social network that maintains art” (p87). The differentiation between the 'special cultural system' and 'art as a system', as Sevänen would have it, is the difference between a cultural and a social system. (p87) See also Culture.

Taxonomy

A system of classification.

3. Ideas and Language

To describe how ideas form, spread and develop, we have to recognise that language plays a pivotal part. Language by no means encapsulates all that ideas are, Steven Pinker asserts, and it is a well-held belief, that ideas exist pre-linguistically in the mind (see footnote 17).

Moreover, the concept that language 'stands in' for other things may be a stumbling block. To understand how ideas may be ongoing and ever-changing, the Platonic concept of their fixed nature; that language refers to them, needs to be examined.

1Structuralism

Structuralist language analysis can be seen as denotative: parts of a sign refer to other things. Daniel Chandler sees Saussure as the originator of the denotative language system: “Saussure offered [...] two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of:

• a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and

• the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents.

The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified.”²

There's no suggestion of fixed ideas; however, no account is made of change, or how that might occur.

The signifier denotes a concept. There's no indication of where the meaning may arise or be mutually understood.

2 Semiology

Semiology describes systems of language with paradigmatic substitution:

Saussure opened the way to analyzing culture itself as a system of signs by proposing that structural linguistics was part of semiology, a general science of signs which studies the various systems of cultural conventions which enable human actions to signify meaning and hence become signs. (Appignanesi, p64).

How systems of signs may represent concepts is not clearly expressed, nor is the development and change of language.

How these systems 'interact' and where the boundaries between these systems lie needs examining. An idea of interacting systems might explain how the semiotic analysis of one 'system of cultural conventions' joins another (see 11.2 Movement within and Between Systems: Networks).

3 Autopoiesis

Though autopoiesis is not a theory of language, (it is a study of self-sustaining systems³), the issues it raises are pertinent to the study of the development of language and ideas.

Maturana sees language, either as words, or systems of language⁴, as connotative: describing objects, not representing them.

If it is recognized that language is connotative and not denotative and that its function is to orient the orientee within his cognitive domain, and not to point to independent entities, it becomes apparent that learned orienting interactions embody a function of non-linguistic origin. (Maturana, p31)

The process that we humans use for interacting with our environment, including other humans, is not fundamentally based on language, but that the methods to express this are generally connotative. This is key to understanding how ideas may be constantly changing, not referring to fixed ideals. Ideas, in this sense, are pre-linguistic and do not need to have an expressible meaning – you might ‘know’ an idea, but be unable to define it.

The development of language in autopoietic theory comes about through recursion⁵. Tom Quick recognises “Maturana and Varela use the term 'languaging' to capture the nature of language as an ongoing [...] activity”. This is something that both structuralist and semiotic views of language overlook: the ongoing change.

The conventional agreement on meaning of seemingly arbitrary signifiers by society is noted: “the association of sound and what it represents is the outcome of collective learning (use in social practice, or what Wittgenstein calls “language games") - and this is signification.” (Appignanesi, p59). Language comes about as a result of the ideas we have about and from what we do, but do ideas also follow language?

4 Ideas and Language: Chicken or Egg?

The concept of language as connotative seems to be echoed by Harland's 'superstructuralist' (structuralist, post-structuralist and semiotic) thinkers. He notes:

The Anglo-Saxon [New] critics accepted a referential, denotational language as the norm, and tried to justify literature only as an exceptional case. [...] the Superstructuralist way of thinking spreads out beyond literature and makes all language non-referential, non-denotational. (p5)

Metaphor seems to be a logical extension of the use of connotation in language. If a concept connotes another, we would use metaphor to express it. Eventually, the metaphor becomes normalised and a part of language.⁶

Harland notes that: “According to the Superstructuralists, we cannot live as human beings below the level of language categories and social meanings because it is language categories and social meanings that make us human in the first place. Thus Althusser argues that a child is only a 'small animal' until language categories have been acquired.” (p68)

The implication here is that ideas are shaped by language itself. Moreover, until one knows 'language', one cannot think as a human! If this is true, then at what point a child is speaking 'language'? This runs at odds with Maturana's thoughts about ideas being pre-linguistic, and that interaction creates the necessity for, and form of, language.

5 By What Process is Language Created?

Maturana sees language evolved from actions used to 'navigate' the environment. The reflexive nature of these acts lead to languages:

learned orienting interactions, coupled with some mode of behavior that allowed for an independent recursive expansion of the domain of interactions of the organism, such as social life [Gardner and Gardner, 1969] [...] must have offered a selective basis for the evolution of the orienting behavior that in hominids led to our present-day language (p31)⁷

The interactions that are used to “orient the orientee within his cognitive domain” evolve into “interactions that are independent of the nature of the orienting actions themselves” (Maturana p30) The suggestion here is that this orienting behaviour developed into language and possibly society.

This concept could be extended to culture. Recursive⁸ connotative (see 3.3 Autopoiesis) interaction would extend to the development of culture and its defining artefacts (see 10.Societal Ideas or Origin and Spread of Ideas).

4. What makes an Idea? An Example.

1 More than the Sum of its Parts.

If we are to look at whether ideas are the product of a process, it may help to examine how ideas arise. Much of human interaction is achieved through language, though not all (see 10.2 Stigmergy).

Here's an example of how language is used to orient us in the world, a label from the Pitt Rivers Museum in the University of Oxford:

Madagascar, Antaimoro tribe, extracts from a sora-be holy book, presented by Mrs Olive Murray Chapman. Written on locally made bark cloth paper by a tribesman for the donor from an ancient book owned by his family, containing quotations from the Koran, Islamic teachers, sagas of noble deeds, and sections on astrology, divination, wills and testaments. The tradesmen claim Arabic descent, and write a peculiar form of Arabic characters. The language may be Malagasy. It is said to be written vertically, and the paper turned to read horizontally from right to left. V Geographical Journ., July 1940. (1943.1.1)

This label uses language to denote the existence of another object and show its provenance. It is a signifier, that together with its signified (the 'holy book') define a greater sign. The holy-book signifies for the museum-goer, without the label, as an object with 'writing' on it. With the label, what is connoted becomes greater than what either the label denotes, or the holy book connotes (see also 9.Recursion and Ideas).

This example shows how a simple interaction (see 3.5 By What Process is Language Created?) gives rise to a greater 'idea'. Where this idea resides (in the label? The object? The museum-goer's mind?) is indeterminate, but it exists as a changed idea, following the interaction.

This can be extended from one interaction, across society, creating wide-scale ideas, that constantly change (see 11.Networks of Ideas).

2 A Sum of Many Parts

There may be difficulty analysing the provenance of an idea: when ideas are defined by a 'sum' of knowledge, a seemingly certain idea may contain some debatable content.

Using the example above, the 'sum' of knowledge is represented by the label: a 'known' idea. However, this 'fact' contains debatable content: for example, is it Arabic? Are the Antaimoro Arabic? (see also 5.How Can We Envisage an Idea?)

5. How Can We Envisage an Idea?

It would be possible to view an idea as a subset of an ideas superset⁹. This might comprise all knowledge.

If ideas change over time, and thoughts are being had at every moment, then the entirety of knowledge could be seen as a 'twinkling'²⁶ set of ever-changing ideas. If you were to examine a subset of this superset (a single 'idea'), it would have the same 'twinkling' nature, changing with individuals' thoughts. (See 11.Networks of Ideas).

Where one idea begins and another ends would depend entirely on the taxonomy you were using (see also 6.Fuzzy Thinking). Ideas are not autonomous and fixed, their constituent parts not confined to one idea (see 3.Ideas and Language)¹⁰.

1Troubles with Categorising Knowledge

If all people's thought changes ideas (see 4.1 More than the Sum of its Parts.), it might be relevant to ask whether through constant discovery, constant change of ideas, the 'Universal Set of Knowledge' is getting bigger, or whether the flux maintains a steady size: the Universal Set of Knowledge is autopoietic¹¹.

Lyotard recognised a set-based categorisation of knowledge: “Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with […] narrative [knowledge].” (Lyotard, p7). This implies that the set of scientific knowledge exists in parallel with narratives, such as Marxism (even if they are in competition). They are not mutually exclusive views, but together comprise a seeming Universal Set of Knowledge (both sets of ideas are held, and both represent some forms of truth). Lyotard neglects fictions as components of the totality knowledge and chooses to concentrate in his Report on academic knowledge and its applications.

Would a Universal Set of Knowledge thus comprise a set of scientific thought, narrative knowledge and the set of fictions? Is all knowledge only recorded knowledge, or does it include the sum total of thought?

If this is the case, does the fact that people die, and their minds with them, mean that the set of knowledge is dependent on the number of people alive? A static set-based idea of categorising knowledge may not be sufficient.

The possibility exists that ideas do not just 'live' in books, or even in individual's minds, but are spread across society. Maybe ideas do not exist as autonomous unchanging platonic ideals, but are somehow linked to each other by connotation and are formed in some way by unspoken consensus (see 10.1 Collective Intelligence).

6. Fuzzy Thinking

We generally like ideas to fit into categories: bachelors are unmarried men, penguins are birds, oaks are trees. However, Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind calls our assumptions into question, by showing alternative taxonomies from 'savage' cultures.

Foucault takes a bogus alternative taxonomy created by Jorge Luis Borges as his premise for The Order of Things, (pXV):

This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. [...]

Each of these strange categories can be assigned a precise meaning and a demonstrable content; [...] the Chinese encyclopaedia [...] distinguishes carefully between the real animals (those that are frenzied or have just broken the water pitcher) and those that reside solely in the realm of imagination.

Foucault further than alternative taxonomies challenging the notion of fixed ideas and the limitations of classification, to show that ideas may also comprise the product of fantasy (see 4.1 More than the Sum of its Parts.).

Pinker takes the concept of shaky categories further:

Leaving aside slippery concepts like "beauty" or "dialectical materialism," let's look at a textbook example of a well-defined one: "bachelor." A bachelor, of course, is simply an adult human male who has never been married. But now imagine that a friend asks you to invite some bachelors to her party. What would happen if you used the definition to decide which of the following people to invite?

Arthur has been living happily with Alice for the last five years. They have a two-year-old daughter and have never officially married.

Charlie is 17 years old. He lives at home with his parents and is in high school.

David is 17 years old. He left home at 13, started a small business, and is now a successful young entrepreneur leading a playboy's lifestyle in his penthouse apartment.

EIi and Edgar are homosexual lovers who have been living together for many years.

Faisal is allowed by the law of his native Abu Dhabi to have three wives. He currently has two and is interested in meeting another potential fiancee.

Father Gregory is the bishop of the Catholic cathedral at Groton upon Thames.

(p12)

Not only can we question taxonomies across cultures as does Lévi-Strauss, we can also question categorisation in single cultures and, as Pinker shows, even single minds:

In fact, fuzzy and crisp versions of the same category can live side by side in a single head. The psychologists Sharon Armstrong, Henry Gleitman, and Lila Gleitman mischievously gave the standard tests for fuzzy categories to university students but asked them about knife-edged categories like "odd number" and "female." The subjects happily agreed to daft statements such as that 13 is a better example of an odd number than 23 is, that a mother is a better example of a female than a comedienne is. Moments later the subjects also claimed that a number either is odd or is even, and that a person either is female or is male, with no gray areas. (p127)

Seemingly fixed ideas can connote more than an category definition allows. This is worth bearing in mind when considering how ideas might be seen as ongoing structures, formed from connotation (see 9. Recursion and Ideas).

7. The Cognitive Origin of Ideas

If we are to look at the formation of ideas by a recursive process of interaction of a person with the environment, it may be worth examining where ideas come from in the first place. There's an assumption that could be made that the ideas are present before recursive interaction can take place.

How do ideas get in our heads? Where is the room for a priori thought?

1 Thinking about ideas from first principles

“What is truth?” asks Roger Penrose. (1999, p129) He works on the idea that truth (and more specifically mathematics, when applied to artificial thinking) is either existent and that we need to find it, a Platonist's view, or can be divined from first principles, as a purely human construct.

There may be another way of viewing 'truth', or that the searching for possible 'truth' is a fruitless endeavour. Penrose asks:

Are we simply following some algorithm¹² – no doubt favoured over other less effective possible algorithms by the powerful process of natural selection? Or might there be some other, possibly non-algorithmic, route – perhaps intuition, instinct or insight – to the divining of truth? (p129)

Penrose seems to be suggesting that there is an unnameable way that thoughts come into our heads.

Steven Pinker's position is that thought is mechanistic, on a microscopic level: “In a well-designed system, the components are black boxes that perform their functions as if by magic. That is no less true of the mind” (p4). If this is the case, the macroscopic result of the 'black boxes' is thinking, and possibly, by extension culture and society (see 10. Societal Ideas or Origin and Spread of Ideas).

The immediate objection mechanistic thought is that it negates free will: if we have an initial mental state and are left to go, we will do what happens according to our 'programming', like clockwork.

We are constantly subject to external inputs and, as a result, our actions are not mechanistic, but undetermined. The external inputs affect our response, which in turn effects the external environment and other actors in it. This recursive state of affairs allows for a non-determined life. (See 9. Recursion and Ideas).¹³ As a result, seemingly mechanistic views of cognition can lead to indeterminate states, so that societally and culturally placed ideas, arise from seemingly deterministic origins.

2 Extending Ideas to Society

Where does an idea live? In an individual's head? In 'society'?

Ideas exist as systems, due to the reflexivity of interaction. Lakoff echoes this when discussing his view that mathematics is non-platonic and is a result of metaphorical thought:

[Mathematics] is a stable product of our brains, our bodies, our experience in the world, and aspects of culture. The explanation of why mathematics "works so well" is simple: it is the result of tens of thousands of very smart people observing the world carefully and adapting or creating mathematics to fit their observations. It is also the result of a mathematical evolution: a lot of mathematics invented to fit the world turned out not to. The forms of mathematics that work in the world are the result of such an evolutionary process.

This neatly sums up the concept that ideas can be developed by constant processes of recursive interaction.

Some theorists have it that ideas spin out from the individual to encompass the interconnected world: “As technological and social systems develop into a more closely knit tissue of interactions, [...] the social superorganism seems to turn from a metaphor into a reality.” (Heylighen, 1996).

It's posited that the world 'superorganism' acts as a technologically lead 'Global Brain' and has the ability to solve problems: “In the following years virtually the whole of human knowledge will be made available electronically over the networks. If that knowledge is then semantically organized [...], processes [...] should be capable to retrieve [sic] the answer to any question for which an answer somewhere exists.” (Heylighen, 1995). Whether the interconnected network of human thought includes all human thought (see 4.What makes an Idea? An Example.) or is goal-directed enough to answer questions put to it, is open for debate. However, the concept of a globally interconnected network of ideas may be helpful to the understanding of the self-organising production of ideas (see 10.Societal Ideas or Origin and Spread of Ideas and below).

8. Self Organisation

1 What is it and how is it relevant?

There are several notions of what self-organisation might entail, and some notion of recursion is integral to each. Self Organisation has been defined as: “[The] ability to create structure without any external pressures, an emergent property of the system.” Emergence is a key term also, meaning: “system properties that are not evident from those of the parts.” (Both quotes: Lucas, glossary.htm).

If ideas are the product of a self-organising process, they need to be shown to, according to this definition,¹⁴ create themselves from themselves, in a way that is not evident from the parts that make up the 'system'. The parts may be people, they may be their minds. The system may be an idea, it may be a system of ideas, or society. (See 5.1 Troubles with Categorising Knowledge).

A way into this may be to look at how an individual mind might act as a 'constituent' of this metaphorical system of ideas and see how it might create 'structure [...] as an emergent property', or sustain this 'ideas system' (refer back also, to 7.1 Thinking about ideas from first principles). A starting point would be to see minds as Cellular Automata:

2 An Analogy for Idea Filled Minds in a Wider System: Cellular Automata

Cellular Automata are simple games starting with a random placing of draughts on a board. The first draught is examined: if it has no neighbours, for example, a new draught is placed next to it. If it has two neighbours, it remains the same, if it has three or more, it is removed. The process is repeated for all of the draughts on the board, then for the whole board again for as many iterations as wanted.

Given a set of initial conditions automata will go to one of a set of states, the fourth class of which is indeterminate, ordered and continuous. (The other three are: 1) dies out, 2) is entirely random, 3) is repetitive). If these are then subjected to inputs, more states are possible. Self organised systems with emergent properties are possible in class four automata (indeterminate, ordered and continuous). These could be seen to be analogous to 'states' of minds – mechanistic yet non-determined, based on recursive reaction to external stimulus and its own current state. (See 7.1 Thinking about ideas from first principles)¹⁵.

Using this analogy, it's possible to see how ideas in minds (possibly on a wider scale of several minds interacting) could be seen as being the emergent properties of a self-organised system.

The concept of simple, mechanistic units going to perform more complex overall tasks is represented by the idea of Swarm Intelligence (Bonabeau, et al), which is based on observation of colony-living insects, such as ants, where emergent properties (such as the construction termite mounds) arises from units that could not individually achieve this.

Bonabeau states: “Models based on SO [self organisation] do not preclude individual complexity: they show that at some level of description it is possible to explain complex collective behaviour.” (p6) This works for self-organising in cognition (with the mental 'components' of the mind being the simple interacting entities) and can be seen in human social behaviour (with interacting people being 'individually complex¹⁶' entities).

9. Recursion and Ideas

I've covered the concept of interaction and suggested that this might feedback into further interactions, using the term 'recursion'. It may well be necessary to note what 'recursion' is, and how it might effect the creation, maintenance and change of ideas.

1 Supplemental Ideas

If you discuss an idea, it changes it: for example, if I talk to you about a concept, I will have changed what you know. Recursion exists in a system whose actions have some effect on itself. This would be true of a mind, which, through thinking, changes itself. Interaction between people is a recursive process of mutual cognitive change. (See 8.Self Organisation)

Maturana shows that there is a form of recursion on a person who thinks and describes the world, who shows 'orienting behaviour'. This could take the form of talking, reading, describing actions, conversing or perceiving. (See also 10. Societal Ideas or Origin and Spread of Ideas). He says:

(9)Orienting behavior in an organism [...] expands its cognitive domain by enabling it to interact recursively with descriptions of its interactions. As a result:

(a) Natural language has emerged as a new domain of interactions in which the organism is modified by its descriptions of its interactions [...]

(b) Natural language is necessarily generative because it results from the recursive application of the same operation [...] on the results of the application. The concept of self-organisation here, would allow for the creation of these emergent things: 'ideas', out of recursive processes of human interaction.

An interaction with the world recursively reinforces the description of the interaction itself. The description of the interaction - the idea - might take a certain form in the mind¹⁷, be described through interaction and then be changed again in the mind.

This echoes the Derridean idea of the supplement. The idea of writing as supplement to language, constantly adding 'only to replace' (p145), bears relation to a recursive generative process of idea change. The idea discussed 'takes-(the)-place' (tient-lieu: replaces and occurs) of the idea that existed previously. We have a situation where ideas are never finished: “This second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first.” (p145). The supplement replaces and adds to the idea, and becomes the idea.

2 Maintaining the Idea's Form

Ideas, as systems would be autopoietic. An idea, created through a process of recursive interaction, could maintain its form as that particular idea, despite a change to its content. For example, the concept of environmentalism, which, although definable, is formed from a system of constantly-changing interactions.

Self-maintenance is discussed by Stafford Beer, in his preface to Maturana and Varela, 1980:

“The authors first of all say that an autopoietic system is a homeostat. We already know what that is: a device for holding a critical systemic variable within physiological limits. They go on to the definitive point: in the case of autopoietic homeostasis, the critical variable is the system's own organization. It does not matter, it seems, whether every measurable property of that organizational structure changes utterly in the system's process of continuing adaptation. It survives.”

Would a network of autopoietic 'thinkers' be a self-organising system that maintains the structure of ideas, despite change in the thought of the 'thinkers'?¹⁸ (see 10.Societal Ideas or Origin and Spread of Ideas)

10. Societal Ideas or Origin and Spread of Ideas

Ideas and language obviously do change and develop. Dialects devolve from languages, which become other languages¹⁹, ideas change their 'meaning' (although the words to represent them, may not).

The change and flow of concepts has been described by Dawkins by 'memes'. “Richard Dawkins [...] realized that patterns of animal behaviour (such as birdsongs [...]) could indeed replicate themselves [...] by imitation. Birdsongs are the most thoroughly studied example of these replicators ('memes' as Dawkins calls them), and they do indeed evolve new forms and generate different dialects.”(De Landa, p139.)²⁰ Dawkins applies memes to cultural artefacts: “as examples he suggested 'tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches'.” (Blackmore, p6).

However, this seems to over-simplify ideas. The only ideas that could be included in the concept of a meme appear to be easily described. There does not seem to be any coverage of ideas that are less easily definable.²¹ A meme is a handily self-contained unit, but a non-contained, multifaceted, interpretable idea, must be accounted for by something other than viral spread. (see also 11. Networks of Ideas).

1 Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence is the situation of the 'whole being greater than the sum of its parts', applied to 'human' behaviour:

The concept of “collective intelligence” [...] is that a group of individuals (e.g. people, insects, robots, or software agents) can be smart in a way that none of its members is. Complex, apparently intelligent behavior may emerge from the synergy created by simple interactions between individuals that follow simple rules.

To be more accurate we can define intelligence as the ability to solve problems. [...] A group can then be said to exhibit collective intelligence if it can find more or better solutions than the whole of all solutions that would be found by its members working individually. (Heylighen, 1999)

The implication here is that Collective Intelligence is defined by goal solving. Goal-solving arising from what would seem a fairly random²² process of human interaction seems doubtful, until ideas that have come about from more than one person's thought are examined: e.g. space travel, or legal systems (see 4.What makes an Idea? An Example).

Foucault has observed the nature of ideas that add up to more than the achievement of individuals:

There is the distinction, [...], between the microscopic and macroscopic scales of the history of the sciences, in which events and their consequences are not arranged in the same way: thus a discovery, the development of a method, the achievements, and the failures, of a particular scientist, do not have the same incidence, and cannot be described in the same way at both levels; on each of the two levels, a different history is being written. (p4.)

The collected actions of individual scientists do not add up to the same actions as all of science, they create two histories.

2 Stigmergy

So far, the assumption that people are the only mitigating factor in the development of ideas misses the role environment and other variables play.

The problem comes when describing the development of ideas – are they held within society or people's minds alone, or also in the physical and non-physical²³ environment we inhabit?

Insect behaviour allows for direct interaction: touching, visual, chemical, food exchange and for indirect interaction, stigmergy: “two individuals interact indirectly when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time” (Bonabeau, p14).

A human analogy would not seem unreasonable: people touch, interact visually and verbally; and exchange, which is a key part of human culture.²⁴

Stigmergy would manifest itself culturally as the human created and adapted environment: the city, the human hold on nature, creative works, designed objects - virtually any 'thing' that has had a direct human influence on it. All of these exist as stigmergic objects to allow humans to indirectly interact and exchange ideas.

This is easily understood for creative works, such as books, art, mass media: a modified part of the environment has an indirect effect. Bourriaud, in the glossary to Relational Aesthetics, defines art:

Nowadays, the word “art” seems to be no more than a semantic leftover of [art history], whose more accurate definition would read as follows: Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects.

Bourriaud sees art as a interrelational process with the world or, as Varela might have it, an orienting process with the environment (see 3.3 Autopoiesis). Art creates interactions through seemingly stigmergic entities such as “signs, forms, actions and objects.”²⁵

11. Networks of Ideas

1 An Ongoing Structure

This essay attempts to show ideas as a property of a self-creating, self maintaining network of interaction, existing within (or as) society/culture. That is to say, if society is a constantly changing, twinkling²⁶, network, are ideas a property of the structure of society?

Luhmann notes society's self-maintaining structure, according to Sevänen: “[Luhmann] regarded the whole of society as an autopoietic – as an operationally closed and self-referential – system.” (p77).

I'm positing that the whole of society gives rise to ideas, existing metaphorically as a superstructure. This idea-structure would be an emergent property of a self-organising world network of interaction. Ideas (for example, artworks, objects, up to ideologies) exist as a small sub-network of the overall super network.

This sub-network idea would echo Harland's reading of Foucault's episteme as a superstructure; a common ground for debate: “Superstructuralism represents what Foucault [...] would call an episteme - an underlying framework of approach and assumption. Even when Derrida refutes Levi-Strauss or Baudrillard declares war on Foucault, the hostilities are still conducted over a common ground.”

2 Movement within and Between Systems: Networks

If ideas are the emergent properties of a self-organising societal network, then what are the nodes and links that comprise this network? How does the network change (as opposed to being static connections between similar ideas)?

We might recognise networks as like a spider diagram, where concepts are arbitrarily linked by lines, that may or may not denote information. This useful brainstorming tool was formalised by Artificial Intelligence pioneers as the Semantic Network. This is best explained by example:

Imagine that, in the course of reading a novel, you come across the word `dugong' and the context does not make clear what the word refers to. So you look up the word in a dictionary, and there you find, not the object or the property or the action itself, but rather a definition made up of other words -- in the present case,

DUGONG: a herbivorous marine mammal of tropical coastal waters of the Old World, having flipperlike forelimbs and a deeply notched tail fin.

You still have no clear idea of what a `dugong' is, so you then look up each of the words making up the definition [...]. As you follow through all the cross-references, so you build up a complex picture of the concept named by the word and of its relation to other concepts, say, that of manatee, whale, mammal, animal, life form.

Clearly, such a mental representation exceeds the mere dictionary definitions of the words you have looked up: semantic networks, [...] reflect the complex manner in which human knowledge is structured, every concept being defined in terms of its place in a web of relationships between concepts. We might picture a person's knowledge as a map, with points or nodes representing individual concepts and labelled links [...] connecting those nodes together. (Sharples)²⁷

This would seem like an easy enough task, but due to the human tendency to make links²⁸, the number that are needed to define something as simple as a dugong, soon become prohibitively large. Even with definitions, ideas are represented by connotation, rather than direct reference (see 3.Ideas and Language)²⁹

Semantic Networks have similarities to certain areas of Critical Theory: Kristevan intertextuality has 'narratives [...] woven of echoes and traces of other texts, a web or “mosaic of quotations”' (Sim, p76). The idea derived from a text is a complex web of not only the present text, but also of those connected. Umberto Eco uses a similar metaphor (nets and labyrinths) to express the interconnectedness of concepts, as expressed through the text:

A net, for Eco is “an unlimited territory”. We might also see this as a labyrinth with no one “correct” way of journeying through it. Texts, as indeed systems as a whole, offer themselves up to multiple interpretations - “endless semiosis”, as Eco says. (Sim, p77)

(See also, 6.Fuzzy Thinking). As with Semantic Networks, there are any number of ways of linking two ideas, catching on to Eco's “endless semiosis”.

A network of connoted meaning, such as a Ecoan net or a Semantic Network, if viewed over time, would keep changing. Admittedly, texts are constant in form, although their interpretation may change. Interpretation is a form of interaction and, thus, according to my thesis, the concept of a particular text would be a property of a twinkling network.

Networks can have many structures (Barabási) from those with the form of road networks, to those with the form of air networks (known as small world networks (see illustration 1 – all nodes in the network are joined to a few neighbours, some (hubs) are joined to more)). It is as a result of small world networks that Milgram's famous 'six degrees of separation'³⁰ experiment could work. Since societal connections are formed of small world networks there's a possibility that ideas follow the same pattern of connection.

Illustration 1 A Small World Network

Although I can't say with any certainty how ideas are situated within, or resulting from, a network, it is possible to state that ideas are formed from recursive (see 9. Recursion and Ideas) self-organising (see 8. Self Organisation) structures of constant interaction: through words, actions, stigmergy (see 10.2 Stigmergy), that constantly change, whilst maintaining their structure (see 11.1 An Ongoing Structure).

12. Bibliography

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