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Subject: RE: [huml] pdf document: The Semiotic Body in its Environment


That's a good read, James.  Thanks!  

It is interesting to me that once 
again, someone in a different field is drawing on 
the ecological metaphor to explain how communication systems 
and communication behaviors self-organize using 
feedback-mediated adaptation.   

The behavioral cyberneticists would approve.

Something to note about social systems as differentiated 
from other complex or non-linear dynamic systems is that 
social systems are aware of their rules and can 
therefore, behave opportunistically.  The relative strengths 
of the negative and positive feedback loops determine 
the selection of the behaviors exhibited.  I suspect that 
some of the projects team members are interested in should 
watch for the boundaries of stable and unstable behaviors 
that emerge and try to determine where the chaos begins. 
Note that not all nonlinear systems exhibit chaotic behavior. 
This depends, again, on the strengths of the negative and 
positive feedback loops.

1.  What conditions, tests, selections return the behavior 
to stability, in other words, what attractors will reliably 
return the behavior to a predictable pattern if perturbed?

2.  Are any attractors "strange"?  That is, do the behaviors 
exhibit a pattern in which one cannot predict the next behavior 
but over time, a pattern emerges and the actor stays with 
it although from point to point, it appears to be random?

3.  What signs in the feedback loop can evoke stable and 
unstable behaviors and is there a strength (intensity) 
variation such that small differences in the intensity 
lead to very large differences behaviorally?  Do these 
recurse, that is, are there self-similar patterns at 
higher/lower levels of organization, say, cultural vs 
individual?  Is there a detectable coupler, that is, 
if a behavior is exhibited by a 'leader' or 'follower', 
does that behavior emerge in the culture and by what 
channel is the sign/signal propagated?

len


From: James Landrum [mailto:james.landrum@ndsu.nodak.edu]

for the Semiotic folk amongst us, as well as others, this is an 
interesting book chapter (35 pages) that uses behavior of two people 
engaged in archaeological excavation as basis for discussion. 
Unfortunately, I don't have the supplementary video tapes of the 
archaeologists in action, but I suspect most of us can easily visualize 
and thus "get the picture."

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/clic/cgoodwin/03sem_body.pdf


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