Emerging Systems, Complexity and Attention

Complex emergent systems develop from the bottom up.

Our general obsessions as humans, intellectually, is to try to characterize the high level system, ignoring the details; thus we invent flying abstractions like “God” , his various siblings, and broad identities like “normal people”. We make entities of the high-level systems, often overlooking that they are in fact organizations. The granularity is all wrong, and we end up with a culture to some degree built on granfaloons.

In system design, when the low-end grains are done right, the higher more evolved and complex system tends to take carte of itself. The Almighty may be on high, but the devil is in the details, which is where He comes from. God will behave much better when the human grain becomes better-formed.

But this leads to a bit of a paradox: the human being, itself a composite of complexity, is defined by organizations of complex associations, looking deeper, of cells, DNA, the molecule, the proton, space itself and at the bottom, the ‘unit’ of attention.

The inconsistency and spinning imponderability of this notion might be enough to drive one to religion. The resolution to it is NOT a new synthetic composite at the high level, but to identify the real nature of the real grain.

An “attention unit” is a functional description of something which we know happens. You know you have placed attention on this sentence.

If a bee, wandering by, were to sting you on the lip, all of that attention would be diverted rapidly. If the bee, instead, flew by a few yards away, only some of your attention would be redirected; miles away, and none of it would be. This reveals some interesting questions about how interference works.

But we should also note that this has to do at least in part with the quality of INTENTION involved. The fullest intent brings about the least divertible or deflected attention.

If the core granularity of the culture is in the intimate details of attention being sent around by the participants of the culture, then it seems reasonable there is a lotto know about how attention really works, what happens when it is placed on something, if there are different kinds, frequencies, colors or grades of attention, and if so how to select among them or improve them.

Both marketing and the psychological sciences (as they are sometimes called) have started groping into and grappling with this jungle of unknowns, but neither have gotten far enough to tip the scales of out times.

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