What a difference an ‘a’ makes, by ted lumley:
Michel Bauwens’s p2p initiative seems to be moving into a new phase, referred to as ‘building a P2P community’ a peripheral aspect of which is to populate a map that geographically positions ‘eventual p2p sympathizers’, raising the question as to whether ‘p2p community’ is a relational way of being in the world or whether ‘a p2p community’ is an organism/collective with certain characteristic behaviours’. these two views of p2p have very different implications.
shifting from ‘p2p community’ (a way of doing things) to ‘a p2p community’ (a group of people who do things in a particular way) implies an ‘objectification’ of ‘community’ giving it self-consciousness and a sense of ‘what it wants to become’. ‘community’ in a biological sense is more commonly an emergent (self-organizing) phenomena in nature, rather than a rational and deliberate construct, and there is good reason to reflect on which of these is really the intention in a ‘p2p initiative’.
this ‘difference’ has been much discussed historically and philosophically; e.g. what would happen to the ‘nation-state’ and ‘nationalism’ in a p2p world? would it persist or would it subduct as in john lennon’s song ‘Imagine’? in other words can we really have ‘communities’ (objects) that are p2p based or does p2p community imply a way of relating to one another that transcends organizational object-entities?
when boatloads of immigrants came to homestead in the Americas, there was much peer-to-peer self-organizing, discovering one another’s needs and complementary capacities/resources and essentially ‘co-discovering’ a shared evolutionary future, … very unlike the ‘co-constructing’ of a desired community future though different forms of p2p could satisfy both the ‘co-discovery’ and ‘co-construction’ modes.
blogs like ‘on the commons’ take for granted, or at least imply, that there is no conflict between p2p and the poltical nation-state (i.e. seeming to imply that the citizens of the state could ‘convert’ to p2p mode).
this note, then, concerns TWO FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING P2P.
for example, ‘christianity’ can be an ‘ethic’ without being implemented as a ‘religion’ (as the basis for ‘building a [christian] community’); i.e. it can be understood in terms of living one’s life according to a certain relational-behavioural model without having to becoming a member of a group committed to ‘make things happen in this fashion’. [many ‘community’ and ‘p2p’ social organizations in nature, unlike modern anthropocentric ‘constructed communities’, are not deliberate forward-constructed entities, but are ‘community’ in the sense of spatial-relational codynamics inspired hostpace conditions (niche opportunities etc.)].
here’s the ‘down-side’, as i see it, of operationalizing p2p in a materialist way (i.e. ‘constructing’ ‘a p2p community’).
the map of ‘p2p operatives’ (‘sympathizers’) makes a typical error of omission; i.e. it shows the p2p operatives but not ‘the rest of the people’. this gives us a ‘positivist’, ‘determinist’, ‘constructivist’ view of the p2p community, which is typical of the popular western scientific view, though not of ‘complex systems’ etc.
from a complex systems point of view, there already is a world out there in full operational swing and so we should have to display all of the people in the world perhaps as multicoloured cells, and highlight the p2p sympathizers by including a different colour in their symbolic cells,… a colour that the others are lacking even though they have many things (colours) in common.
since the world dynamic is continuously ongoing, ‘building a p2p community’ is not really ‘building’ but is instead a ‘transformative’ activity; i.e. it is an activity that will transform the world dynamic in which it is included. it CANNOT BE A CONSTRUCTIVE ACTIVITY IN-ITS-OWN-RIGHT, such a view being pure abstraction, but one which we strong rational thinkers commonly impose on our mental modeling in any case; i.e. we forget that we must implement the construction (of the p2p community or etc.) WITHIN AN ONGOING SHARED LIVING SPACE DYNAMIC and furthermore that this spatial-transformation based activity is going to impact everyone in the shared living space (it is impossible, for example, to construct the United States of one’s dreams, without at the same time transforming the global living space in which the US is included. the US is not a ‘closed system’ and there are continuing global- flow-dynamics involved that don’t recognize the abstract and imaginary boundaries which ‘divide off’ (in our minds) the US from the finite and UNBOUNDED (in the reality of nature) space of our planet earth.
what is placed in question here is whether p2p should be cultivated as an ethic within everyone (just as christianity could have been) or through an actual ‘make it happen’ constructivism, a ‘p2p movement’ such as ‘christianity’.
this ‘membership paradox’ (to be ‘included’ as a member is ‘exclusionary’) lies at the heart of groucho marx humorous but deeply philosophical quip; ‘i refuse to join any club that would have me as a member’ (his dislike of group memberships and the prejudices and conflict inspired therein clearly underpin his statement; i.e. when he was refused membership in an east coast US beach/swimming club, he quipped, ‘my son is only half jewish, could he go in the water up to his knees?’
whenever any group of people ‘dream together’, such ‘idealism’ is the beginning of (transformed) reality. at the same time, membership in a ‘set’ based on a ‘common dream’, whether a p2p set or the nation-state set ‘United States’, can be thought of in either a ‘mutually exclusive’ or ‘mutually inclusive’ manner. if the membership is based on mutual exclusion (EITHER American OR not-American,.. EITHER p2p’er OR not-p2p’er) this leads to thinking of the activities of the membership set in a ‘constructivist’ or ‘causally determinist’ sense, as in ‘building a p2p community’ or ‘building a desired future for America’. this type of membership associates with ‘a community’ which possesses self-consciousness and which deliberately seeks to construct its own desired future. the alternative would be ‘community’ without the ‘a’ which reflects an ‘a-centric’ way of relating to one another.
regardless of whether one THINKS of the membership set as mutually exclusive, one is nevertheless INCLUDED within a shared living space dynamic and thus, the ‘constructivist activity’ is IN REALITY a transformation of the ongoing shared living space dynamic (global community space) in which it is included.
for example, the ‘American Dream’ is a dream shared by the people of the US ‘a community’ which has declared itself to be an INDEPENDENT NATION. this ‘independence’ is pure and UNnatural abstraction. everyone in the world is affected as the US pursues the fulfilling of its dream, since the world dynamic is interconnecting and interdependent and the notion of ‘independence’ of a nation in real terms is untenable. the activities of the US within the world cannot IN REALITY be ‘constructive’ as they appear to be in a rational plan of action or architectural design, since such plans can only be implemented within the shared space of the real-world; i.e. via transformation rather than construction.
which non-Americans can say, regardless of where in the world they live, that they are not affected by the ‘common dream’ of Americans to construct a desired future for themselves based on material affluence and security? there is thus more going on than ‘Americans constructing their desired future’.
THE REALITY IS, that the operationalizing of this ‘American Dream’ constitutes a transformation of the global dynamic in which Americans, and we all, are included.
we can say the same of any ‘common dream’ orientated initiative by ‘a p2p community’, so we have this issue when speaking of ‘p2p’ as to whether we are referring to a purely relational-behaviour or to an explicit structural undertaking.
i.e. it is one thing to cultivate a p2p approach in the world (in our common living space), and quite another to ‘build a p2p community’. in for the former case, p2p communities will form as they are needed;’ i.e. they will emerge, develop and subduct in our common living space as in natural evolution. what needs to occur for this to happen is for the control hierarchies to be demoted from their current position of PRIMACY to a subordinate role as support structures; i.e. the grid of hierarchy must not enclose the participants like an exoskeletal turtle-shell, but must instead support the participants like an endo-skeletal hierarchical bone structure, leaving the occupants free to collaborate on a p2p basis.
any initiative in the world wherein ‘when people dream together it is the beginning of reality’ (so-called ‘idealism’, the opposite of which is ‘materialism’, and we tend to play these two things against one another) that is not ‘global’ is dysfunctional (herein is the implication of groucho marx’ comment on clubism). it is dysfunctional because our behaviours inspired by our clubist dream necessarily transpire within a real, natural-world shared living space dynamic where TRANSFORMATION is the only real possibility (e.g. constructing a desired future for Americans or any other national group is only possible in abstraction, by assuming that the participants are ‘independent’ and operating in empty euclidian space. in reality, however, the actions of an individual can only be relative to the community ‘flow-dynamic’ in which the individual is included. the ‘free-will’ and ‘independence’ of the man in the cart on the way to the guillotine allows him to get up and sing a song and dance a jig of his choosing, but this doesn’t EXTRACT him from his inextricable inclusion within the flow-dynamic of the shared living space he is innately included in.)
our clubist focus, as ‘a’ particular community, on our ‘common dream’, if it is not a dream in the sense of a transformation of our inclusive shared living space dynamic, … i.e. if it is a common dream in terms of the assertive accomplishments of the membership set, … is dysfunctional because it is SEEN IN TERMS OF CONSTRUCTION (building a p2p community) BUT NECESSARILY REALIZED THROUGH TRANSFORMATION of the shared living space dynamic that includes us all..
those who are active members in BUILDING THE DESIRED FUTURE envisioned in the ‘common dream’ are meanwhile ‘whipping about’ the non-members in the transformative turbulence they are stirring up in the common living space.
thus, for example, if the US were to persist in the constructive implementation of a ‘common AMERICAN dream’ endorsed by its citizens; e.g. a dream that puts individual pursuit of self-interest and the right to live in a secure and affluent gated-community, AHEAD of sustaining the health and harmony of the global community, then clearly the Not-Americans will be ‘whipped about’ because the American Dream cannot REALLY be achieved by forward-asserting ‘construction’ but only through TRANSFORMATION of the shared living space dynamic, a transformation that will ‘whip about’ the REST OF THE WORLD; i.e. the world of Not-Americans, who are not accounted for within ‘the American Dream’.
and so it is too for ‘the dream of a p2p community’ since it is something that a collective of ‘p2p sympathizers’ seeks to deliberately ‘construct’.
again, the plan to implement ‘a common dream’ BY CONSTRUCTION, must realistically give way, within a shared living space dynamic, to the reality of such activity constituting TRANSFORMATION of the ongoing global community dynamic. the ‘determinist’ or ‘constructivist’ notion is an abstraction that we impose on our mental modeling which is not imposed on nature.
the p2p initiative could thus go ‘two ways’ (a) the way of mutual inclusion; — to continue to nurture, cultivate and encourage the adoption of the p2p community ethic and to develop p2p support tools, and/or (b) the way of mutual exclusion; — to ‘build a p2p community’ (or multiple instances thereof) in the sense of an exclusive membership society that is pursuing ‘its own’ common dream.
how can we tell which way ‘the p2p development is going’?
if we monitor, measure and reward the advances in ‘what p2p’ers are achieving’ in a constructivist sense, we are in the (b) mode of mutual exclusion.
if we experience a rise in the p2p community type behaviours in our common living space and the associated relaxation of hierarchical control mode, we are in the (a) mode of mutual inclusion.
the point is that it is our ‘shared living space’ that must be open and accommodating to p2p organizing in the broader sense of p2p (as in the case of the boatloads of homesteading immigrants). a p2p that is CONSTRUCTED in a ‘closed system’ form by p2p cultists is quite another matter. for example, we could clearly formulate p2p as a ‘control-hierarchy-resistance’ movement (the CHR-p2p), analogous to the WWII french occupation-resistance movement, which would have a private p2p network and which would constitute a self-conscious p2p community dedicated to its ‘common dream’ of vanquishing the current primacy of control hierarchy based social organizing. this would instead cultivate the rise to global prevalence of the p2p movement as an objectified ‘machine’ or ‘movement’ but this is very different from living within a shared community hostspace which is open and accommodative to p2p modes of organization.
* * *
do we, by ‘p2p’, refer to (a) a mode of organization which emerges as a natural first preference in our common living space as in the case of survivors in a wilderness or immigrants homesteading in new lands?, or, (b) a mode of assertive, deterministic non-control-hierarchy-based construction enacted by a collaborative peer collective in pursuit of realizing a ‘common dream’? i.e. do we envisage p2p as, (a) an ’emergent behaviour’ that characterizes our common living space when it is ‘natural’ and not enslaved by control hierarchy based governance, or (b) as ‘explicit organizational structure intended for assertive constructivist accomplishment’?
what happens if we are not clear on it?
when are busy THINKING we are constructing some p2p desired result, we are INSTEAD transforming the shared living space we are included in. the following drawing of ‘the print gallery’ by m.c. escher can be used to help illustrate this;
the implication is that the man is included in what he is looking out at (one can verify that this is actually the case by zooming in on the picture at the above website). meanwhile our standard sense of visual perception (though not our felt experience) normally ‘excludes’ us from the world we are looking out at. our visual perception thus encourages us to split our understanding of the world into two reductionist extremes; ‘idealism’ where ‘the world is in the man’ and he projects in front of himself, in his ‘mind’s eye’, the vision of the desired future world that he would like to work with others to ‘construct’ and ‘materialism’ where ‘the man is in the world’ and he sees himself as some kind of accidental offspring of the worldspace he is included in.
his ‘felt experience’ will, meanwhile, inform him that he is included in the worldspace dynamic and that, as stephen jay gould observes, ‘there can be no assessment of ‘hitting’ out the context of ‘fielding’ — how the hostspace he is situated in accommodates his assertive intent and the actualizing of his assertive intent are simply two aspects of a dynamical one-ness (his dynamic and the hostspace dynamic he is included in are ‘mutually inclusive’.
‘idealism’ (giving identity to one’s self by working to build a desired future state) can provide relief from ‘materialism’ (the latter suggesting that one’s self is a mere accident precipitated by an objective material world) but when these two play off each other via ‘nationalism’ or ‘religion’, there is a problem in that the ‘world-in-the-man’ vision of a ‘desired future for is community’ is out of synch with the ‘man-in-the-world’ reality wherein he is included in an unbounded hostspace dynamic. for example, the vision of the desired future of the US is out of synch with the global reality that the initiative to construct the desired US future is included in. being that our actions are, in reality, transforming the ongoing shared living space dynamic that we are included in, as a powerful collective strives to construct their desired future, … what is happening to the common hostspace dynamic is something else again and it is certainly not accounted for in the constructivist plan that orients to a particular community.
all of which is an argument for putting into the primacy, the orienting of our p2p relational behaviours to sustaining the health and harmony of our shared living space. this is not a ‘constructivist’ approach. when we start from ‘the health and harmony of our shared living space’, p2p becomes a characteristic spatial-relationally induced organizational schema rather than a deliberate forward-constructed organizing structure with ‘its own’ explicit visions and goals.
if we say that ‘we can build a p2p community’ then DOES IT FOLLOW that we can have a p2p NATION that orients to building its desired future? i.e. a nation-state with a persisting identity like the US or France but one in which the social organizing schema is p2p rather than control-hierarchy based?
we come back around to groucho marx’ paradox which is essentially a statement eschewing the logic of mutual exclusion.
in order to be a ‘community’ in the ‘objectified’ sense of the word, with a vision of its own desired future that it is working towards, that is constituted by a subpopulation within the shared living space, its ‘building’ initiative equates to an unaccounted for transformation of the overall shared living space it is included in.
this is dysfunctional since the actual results can never match up with the intended results.
the non-dysfunctional alternative is to WITHHOLD ANY OBJECTIFYING OF THE P2P COMMUNITY (to never give it its own centric identity and visions of what it wants itself to be).
instead, the ‘p2p community’ can be composed of a ‘type of people’ who believe in p2p as the prime organizational dynamic and who work on understanding p2p and developing tools in support of p2p collaboration but never accepting membership in an objectified ‘p2p community’ (never agreeing to a centered self-consciousness and a vision of the community’s future nor a commitment to constructing that desired future).
by avoiding the objectification of ‘the p2p community’ and avoiding giving it a ‘life of its own’, one avoids the dysfunction that goes with orienting people’s efforts to what appears to be a construction project (for a desired future result) but which is instead a transformation of the overall shared space the members of the community are included in; i.e. one avoids, for example, the dysfunction of ‘nationalism’ which seeks to optimize the ‘part’ without acknowledging that the shared hostspace it is included in must necessarily be transformed in the process.
the ‘bottom line’;
we think we have the problem that we are stifled by imposing hierarchical control on our social organizing dynamics when p2p can work much better. but the problem is not just with ‘hierarchical control’, it is with the objectification of ‘community’ giving communities their own ‘self-consciousness’ and unleashing them in pursuit of constructing their desired futures (even though they are included with a shared interdependent living space), as if they were independent entities. since they are not independent entities but are included within a common living space dynamic, their ‘constructive’ dynamics are not simply ‘constructive’ but instead constitute transformation of the community hostspace dynamic they are included in, in a way that the notion of ‘construction’ does not account for.
if we develop ‘p2p communities’ we run into this same dysfunctional mismatch but we avoid it if we stick to ‘p2p community’ as a form of shared living space based (i.e. ‘a-centric’) relational behaviour of the homesteading immigrants type. in other words, multiple nation-states that flip from control hierarchies to p2p communities does not solve the problem. the problem is that the notion of constructing the desired future of a so-called ‘independent’ community is, in reality, not ‘construction’ at all but transformation of the shared living space the community is included in. what is called for is not only a p2p approach
but an a-centric shared-space-based co-discovery-of-the-evolutionary-future, rather than co-construction of explicitly desired community futures.
if we, as a collective of peer individuals and/or peer communities, agree that we do not know where we are going, but agree to work together to sustain balance and harmony as we co-discover the evolutionary future together, then we will avoid the dysfunctional trap of seeking, as multiple individuals, to force the construction of explicit desired futures and become victims of unintended transformation of our shared living space.
initiatives like open software (a relational p2p approach) equate to the sustaining of harmony and balance as we co-discover the evolutionary future. this a-centric p2p approach is very much unlike the assembling of self-centered p2p communities to construct explicitly desired future results.
This contribution is part of an ongoing dialogue between the peer to peer meme and the theory of inclusionality. It will certainly be quite complex for some readers to follow. But in essence my objection is this: it seems that Ted Lumley’s interpretation of inclusionality wants to reduce human behaviour to the level of physical and animal behaviour, to the purely non-intentional emergence or the individually-unconscious swarming behaviour. And therein lies the problem, humans do have intentionality, are building intentional communities, do have desires. It would be unwise to ban them or to leave this human emergences on the wayside.
That collectives can become oppresive is another matter. This happens when the collective becomes a ‘collective individual’, where a power structures transcends the concrete immanent togetherness of the participants. But the solution there is not to regress to pre-human modes, but rather, to develop peer governance methods that prevent such power transcendence. The P2P Foundation is in fact a purely virtual structures, based on the free association of anyone that shares a broadly similar set of ideals. It doesn’t have an authority structures beyond the cooperation of those who sympathise with its aims. That could change, but the relationship is one of complex interdependence, not one of dependence, so that, absent any coercive possibilities, it has to function on a mode of consensus. Ted Lumley’s second option would deprive us of the essential liberty of creating and inventing new social forms, and that is an option which I strongly reject.
Peer governance has developed a series of techniques to insure itself, successfully or not that we will see in the future, against transcendence of power.
See chapter of the P2P Foundational essay, at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/4._P2P_in_the_Political_Sphere, especially 4.2.A, 4.2B, 4.3.
Michel Bauwens
Michel, my intent is in support of cultivating p2p as our social organizing mode of choice, which translates into seeing the philosophical issues in the greatest clarity possible. your phrase — ‘to REDUCE human behaviour to the level of physical and animal behaviour’ — presupposes the ‘independence’ of human-behaviour from nature’s-behaviour (it employs the Cartesian split). human behaviour can only be relative to the dynamical hostspace in which it is included. as Gould says, ‘there can be no assessment of ‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’; i.e. these are simply two aspects of a dynamical one-ness, though we can simplify this ‘androgynic’ complexity by IDEALISTICALLY imposing independence on individual entities and building up a one-sided ‘masculine’ representation of reality based on ‘what independent things do’.
this ‘idealism’, which is the default REALITY-REPRESENTING practice of the ‘West’, while a convenient simplification, fails to hold true to our experience, and neither does it hold true to relativity, nor to quantum wave dynamics nor ‘complex systems’. my comments therefore do not equate to ‘reducing human behaviour’ from its superior and lofty position ‘above physical and animal behaviour’, but are based on the acknowledging that THIS SUPERIOR/INFERIOR VIEW ITSELF occludes the ‘relativity of motion’ view wherein behaviour is innately ‘spatial-relational’ rather than emanating mysteriously (some would say ‘superstitiously’) from the idealist concept of ‘self-standing inner purpose’, an ‘ideal’ that is NECESSITATED to prop up the simplified view that human individuals and other individual entities are ‘independent’ of their hostspace and that the world dynamic equates to the sum of the behaviours of the ‘independent entities’ that ‘populate’ absolute, empty and infinite euclidian space.
from man’s dependence for sustainability upon two genders and the generational continuum, from the diverse bacterial flora in his gut to the oxygen mix and humidity he needs in the atmosphere and stability in the narrow range of temperatures and pressures he can function in (not to mention his inbuilt inertial guidance system as an essentially ‘fluid’ inclusion within the gravitational field), all of which is topped off by his inextricable inclusion in the evolutionary flow-dynamic, it is difficult to regard his ‘behavioural independence’ as more than a simplifying convention-of-convenience (as it has indeed been described by philosopher-physicists such as Henri Poincaré).
western ‘IDEALISM’ itself would appear to be ‘the reduction’, by the logic of mutual exclusion, that results in the notion of ‘behavioural independence’ of man which is the necessary underpinning of ‘his superior behavioural capability’; i.e. it is not ‘his’ behaviour in an exclusive sense any more than (hurricane) katrina’s behaviour is ‘her behaviour’, it is just simpler and more convenient to personify a ‘dynamical form’ that is essentially relational, in a purely male, forward-asserting representation so that we don’t have to deal with the a-centricity and a-temporality of spacetime transformation, a continuing ‘coniunctio oppositorum’ wherein asserting entities, as a collective, spatially accommodate their own assertings. thanks to the ‘idealized’ convention of absolute space and absolute time, which we can impose on our mental modeling but which is not imposed on nature, we can represent, discuss and debate ‘reality’ in the simplified terms of ‘local objects’ with ‘local object behaviours’ of their own.
with respect to our p2p initiative/s and your comment; ‘humans do have intentionality, are building intentional communities, do have desires. It would be unwise to ban them or leave this human emergence on the wayside’, … my point is that this ‘forward assertive, center-of-independent-self-based constructivism’ is not ‘reality’ but one of alternative REPRESENTATIONS OF REALITY, this particular representation emanating from the IDEALIZED notion of ‘behavioural independence’ and as such it is a simplified (but very convenient in some ways) illusion. all ‘action’ in a relative space such as the living space of our experience, is ‘transformation’ (evolving of spatial relationships). insofar as we attempt to assertively construct our desired ‘utopian’ IDEAL of a community’, we lose sight of how such positivist/idealist-make-it-happen actions ‘in reality’ transform the common hostspace we share inclusion in.
p2p can and does exist in the world as a relational ‘collective work ethic’ and were it more pervasively ‘the ethic of choice’ so that ‘hierarchical control’ took a back seat to it, we both feel that the dynamic of our common living space would in this case be healthier and more harmonious. we would in this case be ‘living the p2p theory’ rather than debating the theory of p2p. but what could become ‘more pervasive’ instead would be ‘p2p intentional communities’ and by that same ‘ideal’ of independence (mutual exclusion) that allows us to say that ‘human behaviours are superior to animal behaviours’ and ‘the behaviours of some humans are superior to the behaviours of other humans’ we could also say that ‘p2p community behaviours are superior to hierarchical community behaviours’ (to ‘not-p2p community behaviours’). the ‘ideal’ of independence opens the door to mutually exclusive pairs such as; ‘superior/inferior’, ‘right/wrong’, ‘good/bad’, ‘better/worse’ whereas p2p as a purely spatial-relational form of organization is a-centric and a-temporal (un-objectified and therefore not amenable to mutually exclusive membership set representation). thus the p2pfoundation can ‘see itself’ either as an inductive cultivator of the p2p spatial-relational organizational form (by collaborative development of tools and understandings) or as a promoter for the assertive launching of p2p intentional communities (communities that are regarded as ‘superior’ to ‘not-p2p’ communities). while p2p as a form of organizing can and does exist in all communities, the notion of — ‘a’— p2p community implies the existence of mutually exclusive ‘not-p2p’ community with all the clubist trappings of objectified superiority/inferiority, …. hence, …. ‘what a difference an ‘a’ makes’.
my intention is not ‘to ban intentional communities’, it is to cultivate awareness of the ‘design shortfall’ that has people single-mindedly constructing their ‘desired communities’ without recognizing and taking responsibility for how their idealized constructivism is necessarily transforming the living space that we all share. the danish cartoonist can hold absolutely to his idealized principle of ‘freedom of the press’ which purportedly leads to harmonious community as a future ideal, but meanwhile; ‘there is no path to community harmony, community harmony is the path’ (which membership collective is ‘right’ and which is ‘not-right’ is a question that is only meaningful if the subsets of ‘right’ and ‘not-right’ are mutually exclusive. such sets are abstractions that are not ‘more real’ than the manner in which we experience behaviour in relation to one another, which ‘doesn’t need them’ and in fact is often plagued by them.).
Ted: my argument is not based on denying the rootedness of human life in the natural or cosmic world, but rather to recognise that there is emergence of new complexity. Animal life introduces motion, instinct and emotion, not found in the non-organic world; human lifes introduces new forms of consciousness and intentional behaviour. Similarly, you assume I start from behavioural independence, no I do not. We are not constructing communities without realising that this will influence our ‘living space’, but we want to contribute to a change into its nature. This change is the natural result of the new types of values and practices that P2P sets in motion. Of course, we cannot anticipate the totality of effects that the P2P practices will have.
michel, what i am trying to share, but having difficulty in conveying it, is that the notion of the ‘emergence of new complexity’ does not imply that the new complexity is embodied in ‘new things’ such as new organisms (‘humans’) or ‘new communities’. that view, which seems to be implied in your above post, is akin to the view of evolution as ‘progress’ in object forms along the axis of time as in ‘ape-to-man’. the view that i am trying to share is the view of evolution in terms of ‘thinglessness’ and ‘connectedness’ of relativity and quantum theory. in this view, the only thing that evolves, the only thing that has ever evolved is ‘spacetime’, the gravitational field, if you like, every ‘thing’, instead of being an object in itself, being an inextricable ‘feature’ within this energy flow-field. in this view, there is no break between ‘inanimate nature’ and ‘animate nature’, the new complexity we call ‘life’ or ‘human’ being a feature of the evolving hostspace rather than an ‘object’. as shroedinger proposed, ‘life’ is a property of the universe (not something that ‘infects’ an inanimate universe.)
‘objects’ such as ‘a species’ or an individual human are, in the thingless-connectedness of relativity, abstractions that we impose on the evolving flow-field to allow us to better share our experiences through language. therefore the complexity that we see in ‘animal life’ that is we say is GREATER than the complexity we see in the non-organic world is not ‘greater’ at all because IT IS NOT IN THE ANIMAL LIFE; i.e. there is just one world and the split between the animal world and the inorganic world is not a ‘real’ split but simply an abstract convention that we impose on our mental modeling of the world..
that this may be ‘too far out’ for some, many or even most readers to ‘swallow’ at this juncture, i accept (the situation is as it is). but it is becoming less so as people continue to work on the implications of relativity and quantum theory vis a vis evolutionary complexity that is not unveiling its origins to us via our ‘thing-based’ representation of reality.
just as a new business can be whipped up and sustained by nonlocal currents in the manner of a cyclone and henceforth be described EXPEDIENTLY BY THE OBSERVER as if it were and had always been a center-driven activity, even though it is more essentially a nonlocal dynamical phenomena, so it is also in the case of organisms and objects in general; i.e. (in the thingless connectedness of relativity and quantum theory) they are nonlocal phenomena (field-flow features) that we find it convenient to personify as local objects with local object behaviours.
the ‘new complexity’ that has emerged in the open software movement would innappropriately be ‘objectified’ as a ‘new organizational form’ analogous to ‘a new life form’ or ‘a new type of community’ (‘a p2p community’), but can be instead understood in terms of a transformation in spatial relationships within a common hostspace dynamic (e.g. what we call a ‘crowd’ is not a group of permanent members but a standing wave pattern through which new people are continually flowing, as in a crowded intersection.).
according to margulis et al, the eukaryotic cell does not have to be seen as a ‘new object’ but can be more realistically seen as a symbiotic (p2p) group of prokaryotic micro-organisms. this kind of symbiotic spatial-relational association can be extended up through what has been thought of as ‘man’ all the way up to and including the earth this view of ‘new complexity’ no longer requires that a ‘new object’ be the body-host of the new complexity, the new complexity instead being seen in terms of spatial-relational dynamics that nest inclusionally within one another from micro to macro scales.
an important aspect of this new complexity is that its emergence is WITHOUT EXPLICIT INTENTION. it is like the wildgeese that go into their inverted ‘V’ formation because they can experience the synergies/resonances of doing so. when there are a multiplicity of participants that can ‘connect up’ in many different ways, some of those ways will deliver unplanned synergies/resonances and the continuing co-discovered resonances will provide the evolutionary ‘direction’ of the organizing rather than it coming explicitly from the participants. this sort of ‘p2p community’ is ‘unintentional community’; i.e. the community organization takes shape from synergy/resonance in spatial-relationships.
in the case of the open software movement as in the case of the eukaryote, the ‘new complexity’ is apparently ‘orthogonal’ to locally centered intentionality.
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