Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

A jungle of ideas, teeming with life, lies in-between what I thought I meant and what you heard.

“He is covetous, not ready to love, and incapable of balancing what he is driven by,”

Good questions do not have answers at all, let alone right or wrong ones.

Identifying and strategizing our way through becomes short-circuiting which is often destructive. The consequences go spiraling off into further confusion, more issues, and more problems. Sometimes the way through is at an entirely unseen angle.

“warm data”—data within its many contextual relationships.

For example, making laws that limit the production and distribution of dangerous drugs does not stop the drugs from being made and sold. Those who see gain in supplying them find a way, either legally or illegally. But if there is a shift in shared tastes and values within the community—a general trend that does not include those drugs—the suppliers will seek other opportunities. So the question is not how to stop the dealers, though this clearly must be addressed to some extent. The more effective inquiry is around how to assist the community overall in valuing its own well-being.

The notion of the individual entity having agency is confused by a paradox. The confusion lies with the idea of individuation. The entity (organism, person, or organization) is bound to its unique perspective or epistemology, and in that sense is identifiable as a separate source of responsibility. But, there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions. On closer examination we begin to see that agency is diffused into the larger contextual processes that are shared by the entire community. Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture.

As Blake said in ‘The Grey Monk’: “A tear is an intellectual thing.”

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. —St. Luke’s Gospel

In that sense I do not offer my forgiveness. I set my sights on a time when I will have found a way to learn from what happened.

In defense of a world that is characterized by mutual learning between variables in a given context—a world that does not stay the same, a world that won’t be mechanized or modeled—in defense of that world, I maintain that nothing could be more practical than to become more familiar with the patterns of movement that life requires. The goal is not to crack the code, but rather to catch the rhythm.

I would like to see the possibilities that would be available to our studies if we were to start with the assumption of contextual mutual learning.

In this era of global crisis, we often speak of ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘systems change’ as necessary prerequisites for the survival of the biosphere and humanity. I am not sure that our attempts at either of those concepts will turn out as we might intend. But, there is another possibility. The ingredient that I would like to add to the pot is the notion of life as mutual learning contexts. To change the flavor of our ideological stew by asking ‘how is mutual learning taking place in this context?’ is to re-contextualize that which has come before us and reset the horizon.

As studies, ranging from cognitive science to epigenetics, social science, ecology and evolutionary theory, are increasingly showing, evolution emerges in interrelationality, not in arrangement.

With this in mind, I have combined the Greek words syn/sym (together) and mathesi, (to learn), to create symmathesy (learning together). A working definition of symmathesy might look like this: Symmathesy (noun): (Pronounced: sym-math-a-see) 1. an entity formed over time by contextual mutual learning through interaction. For example, an ecosystem at any scale, like a body, family, or forest is a symmathesy. 2. the process of contextual mutual learning through interaction. Symmathesize (verb, intrans.): to generate contextual mutual learning through the process of interaction between multiple variables in a living entity.

Instead of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes,’ let us think of vitae whose boundaries in a symmathesy act as interfaces of learning.

I am suggesting that change, then, is a kind of learning. If a living entity transforms some of its contextual interrelationships, even slightly, that shift requires a calibration within which change is revealed

What is the difference between learning and life? None. When is something living not learning? Never.

In a push against the cultural inclination to use engineering diagrams to discuss the complexity of life, symmathesy must be illustrated either through life itself or through symbolic representation that communicates at multiple levels (e.g. art).

In other words, play is a process of learning to learn. It may look like games, humor, art, experimenting, fighting, attempting, re-organizing, and more.

In the description below I have veered from the language of formal prose. To address the depth of these mechanistic habits of thinking is to go downstairs below our verbal conscious awareness, and that requires other language. We treat prose seriously and give it credibility, and consider this form of communication to be rational and precise. Words in prosaic syntax have gravitas in our culture. They appear to offer conceptual stability. But this stability is an impossibility that scientific and non-fictional discourse fail to account for. Science changes all the time; discoveries are perishable and get replaced by new discoveries as old knowledge is expanded upon and, at times, eclipsed by perpetual learning. Descriptions in this form are still stuffed with metaphors, still wound around invisible narratives. In fact, it is reasonable and responsible to ask whether life, love, or culture can really be described with words. To discuss the patterns and processes of the living world we will need to open the form, open the genres of our communication.

We cannot adopt a professional voice as researchers, artists, or philosophers without an underlying mechanistic understanding of the world leaking into our inquiry.

The danger is that if I look at life in the natural world—a forest or family, a person or an organization—and I am trying to find an arrangement of parts and wholes within it, I will find it. I can probably put names to the parts and wholes, and even diagram them in a model. We find what we are trained to see—we find what we have named. • What I will not find with that lens is the interrelational communication, learning, and contextual timbre.

Symmathesy. I am one, you are one, we are within them. Learning together in context, at all scales.

A version of this essay was first published in Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the ISSS – 2015, Berlin, Germany, Vol 1, No 1 (2015).

As time and context continue on, words, like artifacts, just sit there. Print is difficult to evolve, but writing is another thing. It is a process that reveals and forms discoveries through new discoveries. I like words, as I like images. Words are the carriers of formed droplets of discovery. They are paint, they are ingredients, a palette to brush images into ideas and melt intellect into emotion. There is nothing wrong with words. I am worried that these printed words will render themselves obsolete. In years to come they will still be smattered around on pages, refusing to stand down when they are too small for the next larger knowing that inevitably arises.

Beautiful and boggling co-existence requires resting in inquiry: It is both necessary and impossible to point to details and to rest in the foundations of life.