There's something nagging at me. But I can't quite figure out what it is. On the one hand, you say "The larger culture is where these attractors ... exist." Yet you seem to allow for (these or other) attractors to exist at a finer layer, within you or in a very proximate locale near you with a medium layer at "subculture" and a fine layer at "idiosyncratic to me".
I tend to think of attractors as forcing structures ... an overwhelming congealing of *all* the dimensions and factors so that the finer layers have no freedoms/choice but to go with the flow ... kinda like a tiny piece of space junk being trapped in the Sun's gravitational field. Sure, at the coarser layers, things like planets, comets, other stars, etc. are kinda-sorta coerced into a way of behaving. But the more asymmetric the relationship, the more "forced" the finer grain components will be. So, to [mis]extrapolate all the way to social systems, a rally participant may not have much choice but to feel the adrenaline rush of chanting "Lock Him Up!". But where is the attractor in such a conception? At the social layer? At the physiochemical layer inside the individual participant? At *all* layers, a kind of cross-trophic, multi-scale forcing structure? Can there be a stable thing at a coarse grain without there also being a stable thing at the fine grain? Or does "attractor" somehow imply a "thin", reductive system, where, if it's in an attractor, all granularities exhibit stable or [quasi]periodic behavior? To be clearer, this question is fundamentally related to the rhythm and periodicity question I raised before. In order to call it an attractor, some parts/representations of it must be invariant or in some steady state while other parts of it swirl around in [quasi]periodicity. It also relates nicely to my question about Dave's Indra's Net and where/how/if there exist individuals and what are they? As well as the inter-individual algorithmicity of the lower ranks of the Navy and the intra-individual algorithmicity of the higher ranks? FWIW, I often do get "caught up" in a given transient role. It's happened a lot here in PDX because so many of the hipster liberals I end up talking to are so damned sure of themselves. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3 It happened quite a bit in Santa Fe, as well, though. I feel *forced* to adopt and maintain a role simply because those around me are so convicted by their perspective that any evidence that I'm actually skeptical of my own role's viewpoint is interpreted as evidence that I (secretly) agree with their viewpoint ... yet another artificial bifurcation (P v ¬P). In the company of people who deftly don and doff roles (not topics), there's no forcing structure, no need to clamp more firmly to a particular role, because the discussants are flexible, if not natively pluralist. On 1/15/19 12:13 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > Attractors: I take these to be the psychosocial context in which I discover > these roles (and role-topic pairs?) and my relation to them. The larger > culture is where these attractors (in particular the born/raised roles (1)) > exist. Type 2 Roles are usually more context specific, based in some > subculture experience and therefore the attractors are more dependent on the > sub-context. Type 3 Roles seem to have the most restrictive attractors, > depending more on my own psychosocial context than perhaps the others, or > maybe more to the point, those contexts are more idiosyncratic to me. They > are more likely to be adopted transiently and therefore have less investment > and equally I feel the "attractors" are more sweeping... there is a lot more > "acting as if" or "fake it til you make it" for me in this domain. I might > enter a conversation for example, not intending to be a cynic, but quickly > find myself drawn into it by my conversant's adopting a Pollyanna role, for > example. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
