How we intepret The Dawn of Everything

Is how we interpret everything. The book is creating quite a stir in many communities beyond the archeological and anthropological. It is an issue of our worldviews, how we interpret everything we experience through our preferred lenses. This discussion reminds me of “The root of the power law religion”:

“There is no one correct or universal math. There are equally valid but mutually inconsistent maths depending on one’s premised axioms (354-55). This is because math is also founded on embodied, basic categories and metaphors, from which particular axioms are unconsciously based (and biased), and can go in a multitude of valid inferential directions depending on which metaphor (or blend) is used in a particular contextual preference. They dispel this myth of a transcendent, Platonic math while validating a plurality of useful and accurate maths. However Lakoff & Nunez do not see the above as relativistic postmodernism (pomo) because of empirically demonstrated, convergent scientific evidence of universal, embodied grounding of knowledge via image schema, basic categories and extended in metaphor. They see both transcendent math and pomo as a priori investments. And they also affirm universal validity, but through empirical methodology, not a priori speculation.”

At issue in that paper is that many of the developmental models in meta-integral world use the model of hierarchical complexity (MHC) as the defining exemplar of how complexity unfolds. But per above it is only one of several ways to model complexity and is not the ultimate way that subsumes all others. To make it so in effect is indeed ‘colonizing’ the others and reifying itself as solely definitive of everything.

An example was given in a study of the human brain connectome, which uses a hierarchically complex (HC) model but one that does not presuppose the premises of the MHC. It supports my notion that, like basic categories in cognitive science, HC arises from the middle out as ‘bridges’ rather than bottom-up or top-down. E.g

“Dividing the connectomes into four tiers based on degree magnitudes indicates that the most complex nodes are neither those with the highest nor lowest degrees but are instead found in the middle tiers. […] The most complex tier (Tier 3) involves regions believed to bridge high-order cognitive (Tier 1) and low-order sensorimotor processing (Tier 2). The results show that hub nodes (Tier 1(t)) and peripheral nodes (Tier 4(b)) are contributing less to the greater complexity exhibited in the human brain connectome than middle tiers. In fact, this is particularly true of hub nodes.”

They were using the hierarchical complexity model of Smith et al. (2017), which “posits that network complexity is characterised by nodes of the same degree (hierarchically equivalent nodes) being connected in highly variable ways with respect to the degrees of nodes they connect to (having highly variable connectivity patterns).” It differs from the axioms of the MHC:

“This concerns wholly separate considerations of topology to the well-known paradigms of […] scale-free complex networks […] being that complex networks display power-law degree distributions, crudely identifiable by having few hub nodes with many connections and many peripheral nodes with few connections.”

So how might that change our developmental models if we included that sort of middle-out paradigm as an alternative measure of complexity? How might that play out in organizing an overall metatheory?

All of which sounds more akin to Mascolo’s description from this article:

“Although it is possible to identify particular tasks and activities that operate within particular domains of thinking, feeling, or acting in everyday life, most tasks involve an integration of multiple task domains. […] Higher-order skills emerge from the constructive differentiation and inter-coordination of skill elements from diverse task domains. […] Viewed in this way, it becomes clear that development takes place in a multidirectional web of pathways (Fischer and Bidell, 2006) rather than a unidirectional ladder. […] Developing skills do not move in a fixed order of steps in a single direction, but they develop in multiple directions along multiple strands that weave in and out of each other in ontogenesis, the developmental history of the person (or other organism)” (336-37).

Perhaps it’s another way to look at The Dawn of Everything and our broader human cultural development too?