Evolving Systems: In Depth Analysis

The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics

In Depth Analysis

Paul Grobstein
9 June 2009
(with thanks to the Evolving Systems core group for ideas and to Laura Cyckowski for graphics assistance)

Several different ideas talked about during the first meeting of the Evolving Systems core group are brought together in the image to the right.

Deep Time (DT)

"deep history," a recognition that humans, and human concerns originate in an extended period of time before humans existed

Deep Field (DF)

a Hubble telescope photograph that images objects nearly as far away as the edge of the visible universe; expressive of the enormity of both space and time relative to human experience of it; see also The Scale of Humanness. 

Deep Play (DP)

"Bentham's concept of "deep play" is found in his The Theory of Legislation. By it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all .... It is in large part because the marginal disutility of loss is so great at the higher levels of betting that to engage in such betting is to lay one's public self ... on the line. And though to a Benthamite this might seem merely to increase the irrationality of the enterprise that much further, to the Balinese what it mainly increases is the meaningfulness of it all." ... Clifford Geertz

See also Serendip's Playground. 

Deep Thought (DT)

By extension, the practice of searching for new understandings by examining and challenging the deepest foundations of one's current understandings.  See also Writing Descartes, Inquiry as Emergence,  and Rorty, non-foundationalism, and story telling.

The loop

In recognition that time and space are themselves products of thought, that we need to recognize that all human understandings, including those of what preceded us, are "stories" and so cannot be taken as "unwobbling pivots or unshakeable starting points."