F.P. Going Quantum: Adding Time
A behavior of fractals, discovered while measuring coast lines- another fractal- is that the smaller the unit of measurement, the larger the territory being measured appears to be. When scientists used smaller implements, they were able to record more detail, resulting in a larger final measurement. So tracking the micro-processes leading to why someone is a certain way in the world is a much more complex and practically infinite map compared to how the micro-processes between individuals lead to the way an organization is. This is more detailed still than tracking how the interactions between organizations comprise and create how their network is. The scale of the interest plateau is so large, that the unit of measurement available, tracking processes, once again becomes small, rendering the territory intricately complex. This explains why Collon and LaTour described Actor Network Theory as an exercise. They did not believe the taxonomy could ever be completed, but the kind of thinking the practice encourages approximates a closer understanding to how things come into being and how social change actually occurs.
In terms of the overall model, the starting unit of scale should be the smallest unit of perception we can identify as acting in the social world. Because we are at a historical moment when the majority of humans experience an individuated consciousness, the smallest starting unit of scale would be an individual. In terms of the starting unit of time for the X-axis, it follows that the smallest action that we can track for an individual acting in the social world is that of a single decision. This is the root pattern of the wave, the form from which it builds. Because information is the feedback loop of the entire system, both the information generated by direct experience and the informational representations generated out of the direct experience of others, enter the individual perceiver as information.
As information is received, directionally, it dips bellow the X-axis, into the internal world of the individual, interacting with their consciousness, which is conditioned by all that has come before. This produces an emotional reaction, which then rises up, above the X-axis, showing itself in the social world, emerging as a single unit of decision making. Making a decision produces more information, which then dips back bellow the X-axis, interacting with consciousness, producing an emotional response, giving trajectory to the following decision. The overall pattern of this process rising and falling forms a wave. It is the vibratory signature of a person through time. As they move through the social world, this wave fractals through the scales, generating iterations of itself. Each individual within decision making process contributes in creating the composite tone that is the decision of a social formation. Social formations resonate their decision making patterns through their networks and the Actor Network, effecting the decision making harmonics of all the actants within the immediate realm of influence and beyond as their wave becomes part of the pattern song that is being resonated at all the iterations of scale. Establishing an axis intersection point is the process of isolating a particle in this fractal wave form in order to understand the way that it is involved in generating this pattern as it propagates itself.
Decision Wave Form:
Tracking all the iterations of the information-emotional response- decision-making-information unit coiling through time generating epi-cycles in the amplitudes of scales quickly spirals into all arrows pointing in all directions, to all points at all scales. Thus tightly weaving into the fabric of space and time. An individual life is evocatively reflective of the principles of calligraphy. In the art of calligraphy, what internally wants to be expressed is found in the external form available for that expression. The written character for joy is a form whose lines are expressive of joy. As one writes, they embody the absolute feeling of joy inside themselves. The internal feeling and the external form become collapsed in the dynamic experience of creating the expression itself. So too, a person’s life is their calligraphy- their inner world and their outward expression merging. The experiential strokes drawing the form of their life, their pattern resonating through the calligraphy of the whole- extending through time, patterning through scale.
By pausing the flow of time to identify the particle within the wave, we can become aware of what Anthony Giddens calls Struturation. We are a product of all that has come before, structured by the ways it has shaped us, we have the ability to act with unique creativity at every moment. Or as Marx said it, ‘the people are made by history and in turn have the opportunity to make history.’
Pulling apart the temporal aspects of this process, mapping out the linear history of the wave, may not be useful to you. However, this model affords us the perspective to be able to see the importance of individual decision-making and of the individual. This entire model relies on conscious value-driven, ethically motivated decision making to function in a healthy, progressive and constructive way. Which means that much of the healthy functioning of this system lies beneath the phenomenological horizon line of our smallest unit, the individual. It is a complex swarm down there bellow the X-axis, and reflective awareness is only brought to a fraction of the decisions an individual makes. Much evidence shows that to really have an affect in shifting someone’s behaviors, change must happen in their internal world, in their emotional body. It seems like this may be happening more and more because of the feedback loop of information.
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