Sunday, September 9, 2012

IPS forum is a being with a life of its own

As is this blog, but that's another story for another day. Balder started a thread at IPS forum on his recent JITP paper. The ensuing responses to it led me to post the following:

As always you are a patient, compassionate educator Balder. If Joe had only joined our community of the adequate here he would have groked all that by now. We have all grown here through this forum, which as Bryant says is an object* in itself with a life of its own. And it is continually teaching all of us some new things and sloughing off some old things like the very in and out-breaths of any life. The forum is not in any quadrant but a full-fledged holon (suobject) with 4 quadrants, not just reduced to being an object in the old sense of being in a right-hand quadrant. Or something that can be looked at as a quadrivium. This is part of the problem with the little boxes of AQAL.


That is why I encourage you to not only reference our forum but to cite and quote it in your future papers as a source of credible information, opening academia which tends to marginalize such sources within its insular and elitist dogma. The forum should get the credit, not so much its individual participants, since the forum is the suobject of which we are but parts. When someone says something here it is only partly a product of that individual, mostly coming from not only the interaction of the participants in dialog but from the irreducible and virtual proper being of the forum itself. And as you note, no, this is not projecting human being onto an inanimate object, for to even posit objects that way is itself ironically caught within the anthropomorphic epistemic fallacy.

Recall the following from TDOO, chapter 4.1, where Bryant qualifies the above. It is similar to Wilber's comments about this in Excerpt C ** but there are differences. More on that later.

"To illustrate Luhmann's thesis, I turn to the simple example of a humble dialogue. For the last few years I have been fortunate to have the friendship of my colleague Carlton Clark, a rhetorician at the institution where I teach. Within a Luhmannian framework, this dialogue is not a communication between two systems (Clark and myself), but rather is a system in its own right. In this respect, Clark and I belong not to the system of this dialogue, but to the environment of this dialogue.... The dialogue is an entity itself that constitutes its own elements (the communication events that take place within it) and that is something Clark and I are bound up in without being parts or elements within the dialogue."


* He now prefers to calls them machines.
** See p. 50 and following. He even goes into a similar discussion about Luhmann on 60 and following.

Update:

I’ll be expanding on this with the perspectives of Wilber, Bryant and Edwards on the topic. A point Wilber makes is that a social holon doesn’t have a dominant monad like an individual. He uses Luhmann to support this, since social holons have a different kind of agency. While Bryant also uses Luhmann in making a similar distinction, nevertheless social holons have their own individual substance. Granted it’s not like an individual human’s but that’s one of his points; autonomous substance is a much broader general concept untainted by the kind of anthropomorphic epistemic fallacy within which Wilber frames it. I will also bring in Mark Edwards, who also shows that social holons are indeed autonomous and have 4 quadrants.

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