Mid-afternoon. Your visit with Dr. B. the
endocrinologist went well. She said she is studying her American history and
you told her that you had Far Eastern, European, English and American history
but never the complete history of India (as such) and that you would work on
it. – Amorella
I have had bits and pieces but what I need is an overview
as a reminder. I have always considered India to be the Mother of Culture, that
is, the most ancient known of world cultures.
1559
hours. I am ready to work on Grandma 7 while Carol is working on Christmas
cards.
You had a good lunch at Longhorn and Jen,
your usual server, gave you a Christmas card just like last year. – Amorella
We enjoy going to Longhorn for both the food and service.
It has been a while (before Florida) and I hope we make it back before
Christmas. Yesterday I downloaded an essay by Nicholas Christakis on ‘The
Science of Social Connections’ [via Edge #406 – HeadCon ’13-Part V)which looks
interesting but I have not read it completely through yet.
First, why don’t you read this. We will have
a reference to work with in terms of the importance of social connection
relative to being Dead. After all no mirrors, the only way to ‘exist’ any way
normal to the Living is through social interaction. I will bold content to
place in these notes. - Amorella
1610 hours. Sounds good to me.
** **
Selected from - Edge #406: Nicholas Christakis: The Science of Social Connections
(HeadCon '13-Part V)
The Science of Social Connections
[NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS:] The part of human nature
that I'd like to talk about today is that part of our human nature that is
relevant to our interactions with others. There's been a phenomenal amount of
work taking place in the last ten years, certainly, and even in the last year
or two that seeks to understand how we interact with each other and how we assemble
ourselves into social networks.
If you think about it, humans are extremely unusual as a species in
that we form long-term, non-reproductive unions to other members of our
species; namely, we have friends. Why do we do this? Why do we have friends?
It's not hard to construct an argument as to why we would have sex with other
people, but it's rather more difficult to construct an argument as to why we
would befriend other people. Yet we, and very few other species, do this thing.
So I'd like to problematize that; I'd like to problematize friendship first.
Second, not only do we have friends but we prefer the company of
people we resemble. There's an enormous literature on in-group bias and on why
this might be the case. A lot of this literature, to my eye, takes the form of
what I would regard to be a tautological explanation. Why do we prefer the
company of people we resemble? Because we're more comfortable when we are with
people we resemble. Why are we more comfortable when we're hanging out with
people we resemble? Because they resemble us. And I'd actually like to try to
find a deeper explanation for why we befriend other individuals; why we
assemble ourselves into networks with what turn out to be very fundamental,
reproducible topologies (structures); and why we prefer the company of people
we resemble.
And,
in fact, the ubiquity and necessity of social interactions carries with it a
suite of other phenomena, like cooperation, which is very deeply and
fundamentally important; sensing (the ability to see what's happening in
others); communication; social learning; epidemics; violence – all of these
phenomena arise not so much within individuals, but rather at the interstices
between individuals. They're not so much nodal phenomena—having to do with the nodes
on the networks—but edge phenomena—phenomena that have to do with the
connections between the individuals. . . .
We're so interested in understanding human beings that we lose sight
of the connections between them. And just like we can efface the individual, to
some extent—and I don't have a strong argument that we should do this, but I
have what I would regard to be a weak argument why it's beneficial or useful as
a heuristic to do this—just like we can begin to efface individuals by thinking
about the selfish genes within them, we can also begin to efface individuals by
thinking about the connections outside them.
So, the question I'm asking myself lately is: What would a social
science of connections, rather than a social science of individuals, look like?
What would it mean to take connections as the focus of inquiry and to think
about the individuals as the spaces between the connections who are not so
important? And then we begin to think about all the dyadic interactions between
individuals, which are themselves natural phenomena, just like we are. I'm an
object of the natural world, but so are my connections between me and all the
other people, so are those connections objects of the natural world which
warrant an explanation and a kind of deep and profound—in my judgment—study. .
. .
I was asked to highlight some papers—looking at whether you can use
time to response as a kind of heuristic for understanding are people intuitive
cooperators and rationally selfish, or do they exercise rational self-control
over a kind of instinctive greed? The data they presented in that paper, to my
eyes, was quite compelling—that we are intuitively wired to cooperate. . . .
We did an experiment in our lab where we recruited over 2,000 people
online, and we brought them into these virtual worlds, and the subjects played
a public goods game with people near them, a kind of cooperative game with
those around them who they were randomly assigned. Then, we controlled in that
world whether or not people could rewire their networks and the amount that
they could rewire them, by which we meant not only can you, if you defect from
me, can I reciprocate by defecting, or, if you cooperate, I can reciprocate by
cooperating, but we gave me another tool, which is that I could cut the ties or
form ties to people. So I could form ties to cooperators and cut ties to
defectors. And then we manipulated the viscosity with which that could be done.
What we found was that actually we could control the amount of
cooperation that emerged in this group of people by specifying the rules of
interaction. If we allowed people to rewire their ties just the right amount,
then cooperation in the group would appear above and beyond and independent of
the individuals themselves and their own tendencies. So we can elicit from the
group a property, namely, cooperation, by controlling the nature of
interactions. . . .
Another nice paper that was done by my colleague, James Fowler – and
all of the work that I'm describing to you, virtually all of it, has been done
jointly with James—is the following: James did a beautiful paper as well last
year in Nature where they randomly assigned 61 million people
online to a voting intervention and were able to show that actually showing
people a very seemingly trivial stimulus drove, not only the individuals
themselves to be more likely to vote, but their friends to be more likely to
vote, and their friends' friends to be more likely to vote. So he showed a
spread of civic-mindedness to two degrees of separation within this massive
experiment done with 61 million people. In fact, it's estimated that an extra
300,000 people turned out to vote on that election because of James's
experiment. Actually our democracy was improved because of the scientists
actually doing their work in that particular occasion. . . .
This new work reflects four things: First, it’s experimental. Second,
it's exploiting online and Internet technology. Third, there is (to my eye at
least) an increasing desire to try to find things that are deep and fundamental
about our humanity. The best social science now that is being done seeks to go
to a deeper, more fundamental level to try to explain human behavior, at least
when it comes to human interactions. And, fourth, this work is involving
interventions.
From - Edge dot com
** **
You
have left over Papa John pizza for supper and watched last night’s “Major
Crimes,” and two older “Blue Bloods” shows after watching an earlier “Blue
Bloods” so you are catching up on the series. We just completed the selection
on human connections and our use here is out of context as the author is
interested in interactions and connections of people in the real world not
Merlyn’s World of the Dead. - Amorella
2142 hours. The above is a better selection for our
context than what I had earlier this afternoon. I’m going to read over Grandma
7 and see if I can fix it up tonight.
Go to it, boy. I’ll be right there with you.
– Amorella
2208 hours. I am ready to call it a day.
Drop
in and post Grandma Seven. – Amorella
***
Grandma’s Story 7 ©2013, rho, for GMG.One
For you
Living who have never witnessed a ghost firsthand I have one for you. This ghost’s
size is that of a natural green pea. For those of you who may not have seen a
similar ghost, make it an electrified pale green baby pea color. Grandma
reached into her pocket hand first and pulled the small spirit-like orb out. It
immediately floats off, and up from Grandma’s starless night black right palm.
"Here," pronounced Grandma in a muffled thunder, "I’ll let the
little apparition tell her story."
*
The Pea Ghost’s Existence
Hello. I am
the shadow of a shade of my former self. What is black to me is green to you.
Grandma put me in her pocket because I was off over the Atlantic Ocean. I
always wanted to see the Atlantic when I was alive but I never did. I lived on
a beautiful island in the South Pacific my entire life. My sole contact with
the outside world was the disease that killed me, and that was centuries ago. I
had heard many stories about the greater off island in my lifetime. I appear as
a small dot because the eye cannot see my flat self. I could crawl into someone
earthy but I am comfortable. I like the Atlantic Ocean so I float above it in a
dreamy trance.
I know I am
not in the real world, but I am close to the Living being with Grandma. I’m close
enough that you can read me. I think it is funny that I am as dot above the
common i. The human eye is not built to see me as I am so it won’t. Real ghosts
pass you by more often than you think. Some of us call it dead dreaming, a reverse
out-of-body experience. To me it is an into-the-mind experience. You are
conscious of me as a singular green pea in a Grandma Story. I am comfortable in
shadow of Grandma’s hands.
*
Grandma
smiled and gently returned the pea-sized spirit to her pocket as if she were a
rustic farm woman dropping a baby gosling in her coat pocket for its security
and protection. I put that spunky little spirit in my pocket in your year 2006
and now it is soon to be 2014. Grandma again reached in and felt the little one
nestled down into the far corner of her pocket. She gently pinched and pulled
the small round object out of her pocket with her forefinger and thumb. Grandma
then put her up to her metaphorical eye for an inspection. You are a little
larger, in these last measured Earth years. Eight years and you have grown from
the humble sized green pea to that of a bluish green child’s marble. Grandma
asked, "Are you still flying over your favorite ocean, the Atlantic?"
*
The small
round blue-green ghost smiled, "No, Grandma. You can see that even as a
wandering spirit between the Dead and the Living I have grown. I am one with
the salty water of Earth. The Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean were just
names, stories we humans conjured because geography was how one moved from one
part of the world to another. Spiritually, the salty water is one, all sea
creatures are aware of this from the beginning. I was born and died on an
island as a small land creature and I stayed small because my body was my
geography of reference. Not having a body relieves me of such an unneeded
mental device. My heartansoulanmind are more in balance; perhaps when I am a
little larger, the marble size of a Kong or a Biggie, I will have grown enough
to be the size of the whole universe. That is my hope before I pass over
completely.
*
Grandma
smiled generously and laughed with the little spirit of humanity. "Perhaps
you will my modest sized ghost of a spirit, but hear this, you'll always fit
snuggly in the corner of my pocket. She places the little round one into her
pocket once again. Looked to her reading audience Grandma says, "This
little ghost understands, and I find a wonderfully illustrious humor in her
plucky audacity.
A
wind in a spirit or a spirit in the wind,
Shimmering
electric green, black or boney white,
The
mind’s dark night stands alone and chagrinned,
In
the nature of trancephysics in a spiritual light.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment