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these beer lectures are awesome edit: whqt a horrible snipe. hopefully someone adds it to the OP
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May 8, 2021 03:59
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animist posted:In my life, I've found that dialectical self-control techniques like Zen Buddhism / Acceptance and Commitment Therapy are extremely helpful for managing my unruly brain. Watts condemns Buddhism as people "staring at walls hoping to induce catatonia" (or something to that effect in Echopraxia), but in my experience it's really the opposite. Buddhism is about understanding that you're a nonlinear feedback loop, and learning to get comfortable with that fact, to learn your operating parameters. It's not fleeing from reality, but rather, accepting it as it is. Yeah, the dialectical materialist approach would understand the subject/object not as static and opposed to one another, but precisely as an interdependent feedback loop. An idealist would insist that the mind comes first and creates its own reality, and a materialist assumes that reality precedes and constructs the mind. Chris Cauldwell puts it like this: a bourgeois subject imagines himself free by virtue of being outside the causal matrix; a proletarian learns in detail the causal matrix that determines him and finds her freedom in necessity. I've been doing some serious critical engagement with Buddhism as of late, as it has a variety of useful tools that (imo) usually get co-opted to produce better liberal subjects when they could be used to produce revolutionary subjects. The difference comes down to whether or not you give up on critical rationality or not. Anatta points towards two mutually exclusive endpoints - the mystical belief in a 'true self' behind the constructed ego and beyond words, or towards a subject that understands itself as a wholly socially constructed feedback loop. The former is gonna be seeking blissful mystical states on a cushion, and the latter is gonna understand that the end of suffering necessarily requires self-consciously grappling with ideology and committed political engagement. If you're into the intersection of diamat and Buddhism, you're gonna love the Speculative Non-Buddhist blog, as well as its companion site The Faithful Buddhist. Glenn Wallis (anarchist) and Tom Pepper (marxist) have constructed a materialist theory of Buddhism that is, for me, indispensable for anybody grappling with anatta , annica, dukkha, and dependent origination. As for things-as-they-are, well, you gotta understand them before you can accept them, and nothing of note has ever been accomplished by simply accepting them.
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May 8, 2021 04:44
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splifyphus posted:I've been doing some serious critical engagement with Buddhism as of late, as it has a variety of useful tools that (imo) usually get co-opted to produce better liberal subjects when they could be used to produce revolutionary subjects. The difference comes down to whether or not you give up on critical rationality or not. Anatta points towards two mutually exclusive endpoints - the mystical belief in a 'true self' behind the constructed ego and beyond words, or towards a subject that understands itself as a wholly socially constructed feedback loop. The former is gonna be seeking blissful mystical states on a cushion, and the latter is gonna understand that the end of suffering necessarily requires self-consciously grappling with ideology and committed political engagement. right, yeah. i know some people who move in hippie circles and I find that they're generally the first category, including some gen xers who spend thousands attending "spirituality workshops" where they go get blissed out doing group chants or whatever for a weekend... Then go back to their corporate management gigs for the working week. horrible incestuous nests of drama at the level of the people running the workshops ofc splifyphus posted:If you're into the intersection of diamat and Buddhism, you're gonna love the Speculative Non-Buddhist blog, as well as its companion site The Faithful Buddhist. Glenn Wallis (anarchist) and Tom Pepper (marxist) have constructed a materialist theory of Buddhism that is, for me, indispensable for anybody grappling with anatta , annica, dukkha, and dependent origination. i think I've run across one of those blogs before! will give a more in depth read, that sounds great
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May 8, 2021 06:21
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CGI Stardust posted:Stafford Beer - The Falcondale Collection (also on a YouTube playlist found on a Discord): an informal introductory "lecture" series from the early 1990s; Beer explaining his approach to cybernetics in a small group setting over a weekend, apparently drinking nothing but wine. 9 videos, 1h to 1h 30m each. wholesome stuff! comes out as pro-drink driving in the second video
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May 8, 2021 10:48
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exmarx posted:comes out as pro-drink driving in the second video like in Brain of the Firm, when talking about Cybersyn, there's an explanation of why they didn't want to use keyboards for the control room because keyboards were universally seen as a women's thing that only typists would use; instead they designed input around big spring loaded switches that could be thumped by passionate workers (men, specifically) to express a point; Heart of Enterprise is also somewhat sexist it's possible to extract the useful cybernetics stuff without endorsing everything about him, i hope
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May 8, 2021 12:04
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CGI Stardust posted:it's possible to extract the useful cybernetics stuff without endorsing everything about him, i hope i'm working on a post about complex systems science and having this same problem where authors keep wanting to illustrate points, like, well, this for example. Yaneer Bar-Yam posted:Using this argument it is straightforward to understand why control structures ranging from communism to corporate hierarchies could not perform the control tasks required of them in recent times. As long as the activities of individuals were uniform and could be simply described, for example, soldiers marching in a row, or manufacturing workers producing a single product by a set of repetitive and simple activities (pasting eyes on a doll, screwing in bolts) control could be exercised. The individual's activities can be specified once for a long period of time, and the overall behavior of the collective could be simply described. The collective behavior was simple; it could be summarized using a description of a simple product and the rate of its production. In contrast, central control cannot function when activities of individuals produce many products whose description is complex; when production lines use a large number of steps to manufacture many different products; when the products vary rapidly in time; and the markets change rapidly because they themselves are formed of individuals with different and rapidly changing activities.
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May 8, 2021 14:24
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Finicums Wake posted:these beer lectures are awesome Yeah there have been lots of good references posted, I need to update it soon. Glad this thread has taken off!
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May 8, 2021 15:02
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CGI Stardust posted:yeah, poo poo, i forgot about that - Beer's social attitudes are weirdly conservative in a few places. you're going along nicely at 60 then suddenly hit a speedbump out of nowhere. change that description to "mostly wholesome, occasionally not good". product of his time and class i guess, his roots were management consulting in the 1950s and 60s he's joking about the drink-driving, not sure about his take on smoking and cancer tho lol as a whole the series is great! i'm up to 5
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May 8, 2021 15:15
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https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf some more category theory
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May 8, 2021 15:24
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getting distracted by power word- Jeb!'s first book link, this is really nice.
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May 8, 2021 18:38
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splifyphus posted:Yeah, the dialectical materialist approach would understand the subject/object not as static and opposed to one another, but precisely as an interdependent feedback loop. An idealist would insist that the mind comes first and creates its own reality, and a materialist assumes that reality precedes and constructs the mind. Chris Cauldwell puts it like this: a bourgeois subject imagines himself free by virtue of being outside the causal matrix; a proletarian learns in detail the causal matrix that determines him and finds her freedom in necessity. Buddhism seems attractive to many Marxists, possibly due to it's compatibility with atheism. Notably the writer of India's constitution, Bhimrao Ambedkar, rejected Hinduism in favor of Buddhism.. and Marxism. Ambedkar created an entire Buddhist School, Navayana, which rejects the unfalsifiable aspects of Buddhism such as karma, rebirth, and the four noble truth. Instead Navayana specifically names Marxist doctrine of class struggle an social equality. With one of the foundational books titled "The Buddha and Karl Marx. Navayana, or "dalit Buddhism" reportedly makes up 90% of the Indian Buddhist community. Unfortunately the political and secular elements have fallen by the wayside and Ambedkar is now worshipped as a bodhisattva. They seem to be typical Buddhist nowadays, albeit with a focus on caste abolishment. More critically, Ambedkar was definitely a revisionist. Not only did he reject revolution as a valid means of bringing about socialism, he also rejected the total abolition of private property. Perhaps this is a flaw inherent to all organized religious socialism. Still Navayana is a fascinating bit of history The ML blogger Yoshimi also came to buddhism sometime after moving to china. Here's a blogpost on modern Buddhism as it relates to China and socialism Off topic but he's also known for this terrific article on Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon. Which counterposes Americans respect for the white Russians against our fetishization of the Chinese. I think it offers an insight into why America allowed China to open up, we didn't seriously consider the PRC a threat because they were Asians. In comparison the Soviet were (mostly) white and thus capable of harming us.
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May 9, 2021 21:48
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stafford beer talks about negotiating with trade unions in episode 3 of that lecture series. he also has a bit to say about the various approaches to economics--Keynesian, Marxist, neoliberal (he uses the word Friedmanite but he's referring to the Chicago School ppl in general), i.e. they're all wrong. then he's like "this is why i'm not very popular" lol edit: the lectures keep getting better as they go on edit 2: beer correctly points out that marx got a ton of his ideas from hegel, but he incorrectly characterizes hegel's dialectic with the tripartite schema "thesis-antithesis-synthesis," a formulation that hegel didn't himself use and which doesn't quite capture what's going on in the dialectic (or at least this is what hegel scholars tend to think). Finicums Wake has issued a correction as of 18:25 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 04:55
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Dreddout posted:Buddhism seems attractive to many Marxists, possibly due to it's compatibility with atheism. Notably the writer of India's constitution, Bhimrao Ambedkar, rejected Hinduism in favor of Buddhism.. and Marxism.  materialist Buddhism. why whats to be gained
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May 10, 2021 05:32
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beer is spending a lot of time discussing ashby's law, which is explained in much more detail here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics) i'm going to take a crack at working through parts of ashby's book this week
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May 10, 2021 12:13
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Rutibex posted:
You gotta keep in mind that Ambedkar was a dalit who was attempting to get the dalit community to understand the world in marxists terms. So he used familiar Buddhist terminology to explain Marxism by way of analogy. Similar to liberation theology in Latin America Nowadays the Marxism has been left aside. Probably because Ambedkar died 6 weeks after codifying Navayana. Meaning he didn't have time to hammerp marxism into the community
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May 10, 2021 16:46
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sold some books and bought a copy of the macy conference proceedings linked itt. this thread has been a life saver already wrt my upcoming seminar on cybernetics another particularly interesting resource: a paper by alicia juarerro about complex systems and philosophy. screencap of the first page here, but you can find on sci-hub: https://mobile.twitter.com/Tarp_Ghost/status/1391852039043493888 edit: one more resource. here's a book on cybernetics mirowski is citing a lot that looks good. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7636063-the-cybernetic-brain Finicums Wake has issued a correction as of 21:49 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 21:23
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Finicums Wake posted:another particularly interesting resource: this sounds neat. That's a very diamat intro at least
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May 11, 2021 19:44
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Updated the OP with some of the resources shared in here Last page some posters brought up "free will". Seems interesting that AFAIK there has been no way to formally or empirically account for consciousness and the experience of "free will". I've heard that Beer believed consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that the kinds of feedback loops and interconnections he identifies in the VSM are what account for the self-aware decision making usually associated with the word (he thought organizations had the potential for a higher level of consciousness than individual humans). Not something easy to demonstrate experimentally though. Not sure where Beer said that tho, it came up in some podcast episode I was listening to. I feel like the "free will/mechanical universe" debate rhymes a lot with the "individual responsibility/systemic bias" dialectic that's close to the root of Right and Left wing politics.
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May 13, 2021 18:12
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turd in my singlet posted:Updated the OP with some of the resources shared in here yeah, i understand what you mean. cognitive neuroscience has broadly filed the question of consciousness under unanswerable, more a god-of-the-gaps philosophical exercise for students than a topic of serious inquiry. (clearly, when an answer cannot be found in the brain, it must mean there is nothing to answer.) cybernetics and its adjacent disciplines may afford us a way to cut the gordian knot, and that kinda whips rear end. there are some accounts. i managed to forums archaeology up surgicalontologist's ancient threads on ecological psychology (A non-representational theory of mind?, and The mind is not a computer: Ask me about an unorthodox theory of the mind). there are also other approaches like the free energy principle, powers' perceptual control theory, tononi's integrated information theory, tegmark's perceptronium, etc. that all more or less take consciousness as either a byproduct, fundamental force or emergent phenomenon, and overlap in many ways without being necessarily compatible. I increasingly see this 'field' as a grab bag of attempts to apply cybernetic thought to consciousness and behavior by escaping from the individual as our unit of analysis. there's only one problem: they're all incomplete in the same way. I once was attending a thesis defense in psychology about working memory (wm), and the question was posed: "when I am giving a lecture, what information goes in my wm to control my lecturing?" it was tongue-in-cheek. the questioner, himself a wm theorist, didn't expect a real answer, and indeed, he didn't get one. but this was a devastating question. I thought, hang on: if wm is where all the higher-order, executive activity happens, then it should be able to explain lecturing, at least informally. heck, it should be able to explain the theory of wm! so what information could possibly go in wm to produce the theory of wm? well, very obviously, nothing that might both be conceived of as "information" in a cognitive neuroscience sense and small enough to fit in wm. our observations weren't necessarily wrong but the theory tying them together was fundamentally incomplete, built on rotten foundations, and no amount of facts and observations would ever fix that. generalizing from there, I decided the critical test of a theory of mind must lie in its ability to account for itself, at least in principle, and I think a formal account of this requires what I know now amounts to a formalized dialectic. which, as someone noted, we are conspicuously missing, which is probably why there are no complete formal accounts of consciousness and higher cognition. and this is precisely where second-order cybernetics come in! (and why I think homotopy type theory has very exciting properties.) so, to return from my tangent to cybernetics proper here, it would be interesting to view these theories from a VSM perspective with that in mind. 
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May 14, 2021 08:53
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its just seems really clear to me that consciousness is not a state of matter and trying to find it in materialism makes people come to absurd conclusions. "consciousness if just an illusion!" an illusion to who? who experiences the illusion if consciousness doesn't exist? its doesn't matter if you say humans are part of some grand material system and the consciousness isn't just in our brain. the system exists, but it still doesn't explain why i personally experience things
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May 14, 2021 14:54
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Rutibex posted:its just seems really clear to me that consciousness is not a state of matter and trying to find it in materialism makes people come to absurd conclusions. "consciousness if just an illusion!" an illusion to who? who experiences the illusion if consciousness doesn't exist? I love this, the 2nd paragraph commits the error the 1st paragraph points out
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May 14, 2021 19:02
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ram dass in hell posted:I love this, the 2nd paragraph commits the error the 1st paragraph points out care to elaborate?
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May 14, 2021 19:11
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Rutibex posted:its just seems really clear to me that consciousness is not a state of matter and trying to find it in materialism makes people come to absurd conclusions. "consciousness if just an illusion!" an illusion to who? who experiences the illusion if consciousness doesn't exist? It depends on what you consider "state" to mean. Also what you consider "illusion" to mean, for that matter. I think most contemporary approaches don't consider consciousness to be an "illusion" so much as an emergent property of matter configured in a certain way. In the Perceptronium paper Zodium posted they draw a parallel to "computronium" that makes sense: I'm writing on computronium right now (silicon, gold, copper, resin, configured in such a way that it can do computations) via a hunk of perceptronium (meat, water, configured in such a way to have thoughts) sort of analogous to -- just way more complex -- than eg. the configuration of water molecules that results in steam vs ice, or carbon in diamond vs graphite. Similar to computronium, where you can have an infinite configuration of computing components that can do the different computations, you can have an infinity of conscious brains that can all think different and unique thoughts, and therefore are unique and independent consciousnesses, but be comprised of the same matter in the same basic configurations. Matter can be configured in such a way to be conscious, and whatever that word means ultimately, it means at least partially that emergent phenomenon recognizes itself as conscious. This seems, to me, a pretty coherent system. The alternative is holding that consciousness, or an individual's consciousness, exists "somewhere else", and specifically outside of the material universe we know, which seems pretty anti-materialist. Free will/self-determination is a trickier problem, but thankfully due to the nature of our consciousness we can't perceive any sort of lack of free will. Free will might exist by some mechanism we don't understand (though this is probably unlikely), or inability to perceive lack of free will might be a fundamental part of consciousness, or there might be higher-order consciousnesses that can perceive their lack of free will.
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May 14, 2021 21:07
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consciousness describes a vague section of the hilbert space of possible self-referentialism by learning organizations
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May 14, 2021 21:17
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:Matter can be configured in such a way to be conscious, and whatever that word means ultimately, it means at least partially that emergent phenomenon recognizes itself as conscious. This seems, to me, a pretty coherent system. The alternative is holding that consciousness, or an individual's consciousness, exists "somewhere else", and specifically outside of the material universe we know, which seems pretty anti-materialist. One can also think that consciousness is “emergent phenomenon recognizes itself as conscious” and still be an idealist too. That we are meat sacks is a non sequitor to if the forms are real. it is also non sequitor to the idea that we as meat sacks might participate in the ideal.
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May 14, 2021 21:23
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Bar Ran Dun posted:One can also think that consciousness is “emergent phenomenon recognizes itself as conscious” and still be an idealist too. That we are meat sacks is a non sequitor to if the forms are real. it is also non sequitor to the idea that we as meat sacks might participate in the ideal. oh yeah, sure -- there's still plenty of room for non-material things and I think you could happily consider the recursive self-identification of consciousness as necessarily non-material regardless of whatever structure or substrate actually carries it out. Self-referentiality and everything that derives from it may not be materially "real" but the perceptronium configuration of matter can participate in it in the same way that the computronium configuration can participate in like floating point math etc. I'm just trying to communicate that there's no Other Thing that exists independently but separate from material reality beaming thoughts into our meat in order to make it conscious.
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May 14, 2021 22:05
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:Matter can be configured in such a way to be conscious, and whatever that word means ultimately, it means at least partially that emergent phenomenon recognizes itself as conscious. This seems, to me, a pretty coherent system. The alternative is holding that consciousness, or an individual's consciousness, exists "somewhere else", and specifically outside of the material universe we know, which seems pretty anti-materialist. just recognizing itself is the easy problem of consciousness, I'm talking about the hard problem. colours, smells, all kinds of qualia, the actual personal experience of consciousness. yeah lol its anti-materialist i'm an idealist sorry i snuck into your thread  but i mean even the physicists aren't even materialists any more they think everything is just information/math and the physical universe is a manifestation of information. thats just cowards idealism. i mean where is pi? i'm sure you agree pi exists so where is it
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May 14, 2021 22:14
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abstracta like mathematical objects have always been difficult for hardcore scientific naturalists (who tend to be nominalists) to explain. you can't do science without math, and math is unusually effective at letting us model and manipulate the world, so i just accept mathematical objects into my ontology for that reason. but you are right in that it is a puzzle for materialism. i'm sure there are still people trying to carry out the nominalist project, but i'm pretty unfamiliar with the philosophy of math stuff going on today. here's an older paper on nominalism you might like, though, if you're wary of these kinds of things steps towards a constructive nominalism https://www.jstor.org/stable/2266485?seq=1 Finicums Wake has issued a correction as of 23:41 on May 14, 2021 |
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May 14, 2021 23:36
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mathematical objects are just human descriptions of equivalence classes of physical systems, it's not hard
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May 15, 2021 00:19
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Rutibex posted:just recognizing itself is the easy problem of consciousness, I'm talking about the hard problem. colours, smells, all kinds of qualia, the actual personal experience of consciousness. yeah lol its anti-materialist i'm an idealist sorry i snuck into your thread (in a certain sense) Tegmark caught u watchin 👀 I think on the subject of qualia I'm willing to just let it be (handwave it?) as something that happens within consciousness and sense-experience by consciousness is unique to consciousness itself. I don't know if there is or has to be any material basis for how something subjectively feels. Maybe qualia is emergent from or encoded into material reality into a way we can't (or don't yet) understand? Maybe a complex enough computer system feels a certain way doing certain calculations, or could if it had a perceptive part? I don't know but I think I'm okay with not knowing if I can just put in the "consciousness" box.
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May 15, 2021 00:22
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animist posted:mathematical objects are just human descriptions of equivalence classes of physical systems, it's not hard yeah but physical systems may be nothing too.
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May 15, 2021 02:26
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that's an idealistic assertion, so im comfortable ignoring it for the rest of my life
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May 16, 2021 17:41
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animist posted:that's an idealistic assertion, so im comfortable ignoring it for the rest of my life ehh it’s Zizek’s assertion. idealists get all the cool tricks. here’s another question does anyone else share a hatred for thinking based in linear programming when it is compared to thinking in terms of systems?
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May 16, 2021 20:19
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the pickering book i linked upthread is interesting in that it focuses on british cybernetics, the war effort in the uk, and the ratio club, whereas the typical cybernetics origin story focuses on the american cyberneticists and the macy conferences and american science. it is also a much easier read than something like the beginning of the mirowski book, which covers the american cyberneticists in great detail. imo the first ~100 pages of the mirowski book are a good introduction to the american origin story, if only b/c of all the poo poo he cites and points you towards. edit: the paper i'm working on is like half history of science stuff on cybernetics and half history of philosophy. the philosophy part will focus on people like leibniz, bertrand russell and wilfrid sellars. i don't think many of you will care about that part, but i will post the historical section in about a month, which is when the paper is due. i'll effortpost after i turn it in, if only so that my professor doesn't just think i'm plagiarizing forums poster 'Finicums Wake' from cspam Finicums Wake has issued a correction as of 02:24 on May 17, 2021 |
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May 17, 2021 02:14
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gonna bump this dead thread with something that's been banging around in my head for a while. i feel like existing forms of micro-organization (like groups of friends moving from place to place as roommates, or the idea of 'found families' you see in queer communities) have the potential to be formalized and turned into a form of deliberate organizing. cybernetic concepts like Beer's VSM could turn these natural structures into something more coherent and directed and provide an alternative to the nuclear family model; and potentially form autonomous 'cellular communes' that act within our hypercapitalist dystopia like people do while providing its members with the benefits currently given by families it's v  lol but i had a positive response in one of my commie nerd discords so i figured i'd share it here tooi feel like the place to start would be to identify where small-scale orgs occur naturally, identify the problems that can exist in those structures, and start trying to design Beerian 'System Two' type machines that can solve those problems (System Two in Stafford Beer's VSM represents simple coordination tools between autonomous units that prevent conflict. A very basic example is a calendar, where individuals who want to use a resource can schedule themselves and others within the system will know not to show up and try to use that resource at the marked-off time. a more complicated example is git, which allows software developers to collaborate on the same codebase without irretrievably overwriting working code or stepping on each other's toes) so one potential example would be roommates sharing a rented property. incompatibility between roommates is a serious headache: can, say, a questionnaire and a logistic regression match people better than replying to Craigslist ads or moving in with your gym buddy? if not, what can? another problem in that situation is trusting one person to collect rent and give it to the landlard. can some kind of simple escrow service be set up and turned into an app so no one has to worry about Devin spending the rent on heroin? once you have those basic tools in place, you would have an environment suitable for more elaborate organization- Beer's System Three builds off System Two by deliberately coordinating activities, basically acting as "manager". if System Two is a calendar individuals can use to delineate times where a resource is being used, System Three is a scheduler that knows who is in the system and how often they use that resource, and uses that information to coordinate timing of that resource use for efficiency. on top of this can be built information-gathering and modeling (System Four) for the commune to develop an understanding of its place in the world, and executive functions like identity and values (System Five) so the commune can collectively make decisions about what it wants to do my thinking is small communes each behaving as a unit, then organizing with each other by developing Systems Two between the communes and again building up higher levels of organization from there, recursively via the same process by which they were created, creating new forms of mass organizations that are hopefully more resilient than older styles of organization again this is lol but idk i kind of feel like new ideas are desperately needed for organizing. saw some post on here about the Tether bullshit that really hit home for me: "if you invent a new kind of crime, you can make a ton of money before the law catches up with you". capital already has extremely effective passive and active resistances against conventional organizing like unions and parties and 'social movements'; i feel like something like this could 'fly under the radar' and actually have some chance of making some progress towards material goals of socialism where current organizing efforts are banging their heads against the wall
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May 25, 2021 04:41
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yeah quite a lot of that is in business management literature. edit: and originating from similar root ideas.
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May 25, 2021 06:59
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I find myself rereading The Question Concerning Technology and I find myself taking away three rather important points. Technology is a revealing. Technology is enframing. And that revealing and enframing are danger but that also has saving power. Heidegger there is well behind Tillich (Tillich is another route into existentialist thought, he studied with Heidegger in Germany but he rejects Heideggar while using similar categories he got chased out in 33 for being a socialist and came to the states doing mostly systematic theology). Anyway he wrote my two favorite sermons. The relevant one here is The Shaking of the Foundations. Tillich uses those same three elements (and decades before Heidegger, gently caress the slow rear end nazi) to look at the bomb at the beginning of the Cold War. I think that trio, Revealation, enframing, and danger/saving is what’s at stake in cybernetics
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May 30, 2021 23:09
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https://twitter.com/kevinbaker/status/1399002595327422477?s=19Bar Ran Dun posted:yeah quite a lot of that is in business management literature. stafford beer was a management consultant lol, yes, . my point is to apply this organizational style to small groups of people to take advantage of resource sharing and organized planning. kind of filling a role somewhat combining a family and a small business, but with control structures built around the VSM and not a rigid social hierarchy. e: and with a function of improving the material conditions of members and creating new opportunities for organizing (between groups), vs reproducing bourgeois class structures turd in my singlet has issued a correction as of 14:38 on May 31, 2021 |
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May 31, 2021 14:20
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turd in my singlet posted:e: and with a function of improving the material conditions of members and creating new opportunities for organizing (between groups), vs reproducing bourgeois class structures what does let’s say a horizontal project management or horizontally organized supply look like in terms of class? Let me start over , there is a category error. A vertically oriented business with a hierarchical structure and rigid social rules isn’t really a bourgeois structure. Most businesses aren’t really run with bourgeois structures they’re run with conservative feudal structures. Quite a lot of business consultancy is about breaking down those fuedal structures and reassembling them as bourgeois structures. Horizontal organizations that’s more bourgeois, vertical still very feudal. In the socialist decision Tillich characterized the bourgeois in this way: Bar Ran Dun posted:the Bourgeois principle is the dissolution of all conditions relating to origin, they are to be mastered and reassembled to serve the aim of thought and action. Goals instead of being, tools instead of intrinsic values. It is objectification and analysis. To objectify is to wholly condition and to remove all relationships to origins. To objectify and subjugate everything by the reduction of all things to systems (We could and probably should digress on the topic of systems. I’ll link to things I’ve previously written on that subject after this post.) But back to this turd in my singlet posted:: and with a function of improving the material conditions of members and creating new opportunities for organizing (between groups), vs reproducing bourgeois class structures Goals instead of being. I guess what I’m saying here is what technology reveals is danger and saving power. This whole cybernetics business, the reduction of all things to systems, is dangerous. To have saving power it has to also retain our connections to origin and it has to allow for our being. If it doesn’t do those two things it’s just an evolution of the Bourgeois principle.
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May 31, 2021 21:20
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Cybernetics and complexity science in general is something I want to do more in after listening to GIU and reading People's Republic of Walmart. Here's a neat map of where cybernetics fits in with other fields in complexity science. Bar Ran Dun posted:Goals instead of being. I guess what I’m saying here is what technology reveals is danger and saving power. This whole cybernetics business, the reduction of all things to systems, is dangerous. To have saving power it has to also retain our connections to origin and it has to allow for our being. If it doesn’t do those two things it’s just an evolution of the Bourgeois principle. I think Part 2 of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace touched upon this. Curtis talked about how the early views of ecology and framing nature as a machine that could reach a steady equilibrium didn't match up with what was going on.
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Jun 1, 2021 02:24
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