computer systems and technology, an increasing majority of the world's
information is stored electronically. It makes sense then that as an
industry we rely on high-tech electronic protection systems to guard
that information. As a professional hacker, I get paid to uncover
weaknesses in those systems and exploit them.» -- product description
of "No Tech Hacking" on Amazon.com
The actual cliché, is, of course, that *knowledge* is power; in any
case, the real message of the quote above is that power is wrapped up
with /exploitation/. (Foucault might think a bit differently about
this, I'll have to check this out and report back (something I read
last night...).)
Lately I've been yaking about "sense-making", which I think works
along dimensions having to do with Motivation, Simplification,
Control, Experiment, Praxis, and Interconnection. Since sense-making
is a rather fundamental human activity, I wonder if these activities
might be usefully mapped onto Saunders MacLane's "+", "-", "*", and
"/" (from "Categories for the Working Mathematician").
Indeed, thinking about this made me wonder why it is that
mathematicians talk about ideas like "contradiction" *without* talking
about the more fundamental human experiences related to this
phenomenon (e.g. surprise or sadness). Well, it's a general trend
with academic subjects to leave out everything that the learner is
"presumed to know" (whether the presumed-known material is quantum
mechanics or the state of one's own soul...).
Anyway, it's easy to see that Simplification is rather like a "/",
Interconnection is rather like a "+", Praxis is a bit like a "*" (i.e.
it is itself a mapping of some sort), and Experiment is a bit like a
"-" ("now let's see what happens when we restrict the problem in this
way..."). Maybe a bit glib, and besides, I've left out Motivation and
Control, which are obviously pretty major. In any case, if
sense-making is the overall activity, it's reasonable to think that it
might have a few basic constituent actions.
We could try that idea out a different point of view on Ken Wilbur's
I/We/Its/It framework, in the first place to come up with some
narratives:
When making sense of something, *I* do some Experiments, sometimes
looking at Simplified versions of the problem; sometimes I will also
ask someone else for help, and *We* are able to do more by working
together and Interconnecting our skills and knowledge; out of this
comes some patterns, often a set of relationships between variables
(*Its*) that are embodied in some means of Control; lastly, the
take-home point (*It*) is a Praxis, something I can do that addresses
my initial Motivation for looking at the problem.
This suggests the correspondences:
I ~ Experiment, Simplification ("/", "-")
We ~ Interconnection ("+")
Its ~ Control (no symbol)
It ~ Praxis, Motivation ("*")
Well... I'm tempted to jiggle this a little bit, so that
I ~ "-"
We ~ "+"
Its ~ "/"
It ~ "*"
That is, insofar as "/" allows us to choose what levels of complexity
to work at, or allows us to run algorithms like "divide and conquer"
-- it dose begin to seem like a basic emblem of "control". Besides,
it is commonly used to take apart "*", in other words, as the operator
that deconstructs practices. (It indicates the factors of
production?)
So, that's pretty interesting, yeah? :) But what about that notion of
Dynamic Mapping that we were supposed to be getting to?
In the short essay I've been working on
(http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/crc-conference-abstract), I've
suggested that Dynamic Mapping is a good way to understand and improve
social interactions. I claimed that in order to make *useful* maps,
we would want to understand something about sense-making behaviour.
(Maps are somehow supposed to help with that.) ALL of the activities
I engage with are supposed to connect back to this thematic idea of
Dynamic Mapping -- which I guess I'm saying is basically "helping out
with sense-making". So, at least initially, my plan is to analyse my
various proposed activities in terms of their relationship to the
various dimension of sense-making that I've sketched (probably
focusing on Simplification, Interconnection, Control, and Praxis, in
light of the above symbol-wrangling). After that, the question of
Dynamic Mapping should then just be "what can I do to help?"...
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