DAVID A. ENGSTRØM -
part of the whole,
whole of the part,
beginning~ending,
together~apart.
sentient being~becomings,
progress~regress,
more~less,
accidentally~on purpose.
metastable state~tendencies,
create~annihilate functional information,
enfolding~exfolding flight~pearchings,
integrating~segregating boundary~domains,
it’s self-organizing~informational dynamics,
the coordination dynamics of its individual~collectives,
its converging~diverging conscious~unconscious,
its sleeping~waking micro~macro...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO – “It seems that many aspects of modern life as well as the people who talk about them are in need of tildizing. Take the Gulf oil spill for example. As reported the other day “There’s so much noise out there saying the Gulf is dead or the Gulf will come back easily, but the truth is in the middle”. Invariably the either/or mode of inquiry fails or is just the first line of attack, posing one idealized alternative against another. This strategy may have served us well in the past, but the issues facing us are far...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO & DAVID A. ENGSTRØM – have written The Complementary Nature to summarize their research plan. In this book, Kelso and Engstrøm contend that ubiquitous contraries are complementary and propose a comprehensive, empirically-based scientific theory of how the polarized world and the world in between can be reconciled. They nominate the squiggle (~), as the symbolic punctuation for reconciled complementary pairs. The book reconciles “the philosophy of complementary pairs” with the science of coordination dynamics.
As mentioned above,...
Mtsbwy! or May the squiggle be with you! This is what we call the squiggle greeting: It means that you wish for the person you greet with it to awaken, be mindful of, or simply appreciate their squiggle sense, that is, their sixth sense of the complementary nature, such that they might transcend detrimental either/or thinking, and achieve, experience and enjoy at will the benefits and wonder of sentient metastability, that...
CONCEPT – The picture provides one view of our study of the complementary nature, that is entitled, ‘The Four Aspects’. The Four Aspects are: (1) The Squiggle Sense, abbreviated TSS (2) The Complementary Nature, abbreviated TCN, (3) Complementary Pairs, abbreviated CP, and are also called squiggles (4) Coordination Dynamics, abbreviated CD. Take a look at the picture, a tetrahedran with the four aspects...
BENITES, TOGNOLI, DEGUZMAN & KELSO – “In the framework of coordination dynamics, opponent pairs of concepts (e.g. self and other) may be formally viewed as complementary forces of a dynamical system (Kelso & Engstrøm, 2008). These forces create rich behavior during which tendencies for integration and segregation co-exist. Integration of self- and other-behavior leads to cooperative action and...
“So I am always between two currents of thought, first the material difficulties, turning round and round to make a living; and second, the study of color. I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO – “Despite all the successes of contemporary neuroscience in alleviating the many neuropsychiatric and neurological diseases that afflict us, we–us human beings–have not changed in any fundamental sense. Wars, poverty, rape, violence, fear, greed, power, etc. seem to permeate modern life just as they have for centuries. What can we do to change that, to change ourselves? Changing...
VIKTOR JIRSA – “Researchers in the field of Coordination Dynamics aim to identify general laws of pattern formation in human movements rather than searching for a locus of movement pattern generation. This approach is inspired by ideas borne by the theory of Dynamic Systems and Self-organization. Over the last two decades a rhythmic movement paradigm has been the dominant experimental task constraint in this...
BOOK REVIEW - “For the past twenty years Scott Kelso’s research has focused on extending the physical concepts of self-organization and the mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics to understand how human beings (and human brains) perceive, intend, learn, control, and coordinate complex behaviors. In this book Kelso proposes a new, general framework within which to connect brain, mind, and behavior. Kelso’s...
THE COMPLEMENTARY NATURE – J. A. Scott Kelso and David A. Engstrøm. Cambridge (Massachusetts): MIT Press. ISBN:0-262-11291-4. 2006. Reviewed by Arthur Fabel. The 2000 United States presidential election was decided by some 500 votes out of 100 million, evenly split between conservative and liberal, red and blue states, rural or urban, and so on. The 2004 election was similar, and recently in Germany the vote for...
ABSTRACT – The basic reciprocity between individual parts and collective organization constitutes a key scientific question spanning the biological and social sciences. Such reciprocity is accompanied by the absence of direct linkages between levels of description giving rise to what is often referred to as the aggregation or nonequivalence problem between levels of analysis. This issue is encountered both in...
SCIENCE – Scientifically speaking, nature is grounded in the laws of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, a strange situation arises: atoms and photons can behave as either waves or particles, and which behavior is observed depends upon the instrument used to measure it. Although waves and particles seem to be totally different and apparently mutually exclusive descriptions of the quantum behavior, they are not...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO – “I thought it might be useful to say a few words about the history of Coordination Dynamics and to take stock of how far we’ve come and where we are going. It’s my hope that as a result of this meeting we can identify gaps requiring further experimental and theoretical research, with the goal of course of understanding the laws, principles and mechanisms of coordination in different...
“As long as Knecht permitted the flow of inner images to come without direction, as they do, like dreams, in the initial stage of relaxation, there were two principal scenes which emerged from the stream and lingered, two pictures or symbols, two parables. In the first Knecht, as a boy, followed the Master along a variety of ways. The Music Master strode before him as his guide, and each time he turned around and showed...
“This marvellous book describes a wealth of biological features in terms of the structure of the underlying dynamical space, its bifurcations, and its attractors. This dynamical space is parameterised (say by the frequency of a gait), and as the value of the parameter changes, the dynamics changes, sometimes significantly (such as changing from a trot to a gallop). Moreover, the change can also depend on how the...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO -”Twenty years of empirical and theoretical research has demonstrated that basic forms of biological coordination arise and change due to self-organizing synergetic processes. Here we suggest, using facts and ideas from brain research and quantum measurement theory, that metastability in the underlying coordination dynamics is crucial for the creation and annihilation of meaningful information. Such...
Coordination comes in many guises and represents one of the most striking, but least understood features of living things. Over the last 20 years or so a new foundation for understanding coordination has emerged called Coordination Dynamics. Grounded in the concepts of self-organization and the tools of nonlinear dynamics, appropriately extended to handle informational aspects of living things, Coordination Dynamics aims to...
TERMINOLOGY – To grok (pronounced /ˈɡrɒk/) something is to ‘share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity.’ The prolific science~fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein’s view of quantum theory, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the...
In a recent scientific journal article entitled ‘Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI): Exploring Novel Behaviors via Coordination Dynamics’, brain scientists Kelso, de Guzman, Reveley and Tognoli have introduced ‘Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI)’: “a coupled dynamical system for studying real time interaction between a human and a machine. In this proof of concept study, human subjects coordinate...
ABSTRACT – Niels Bohr’s maxim contraria sunt complementa (contraries are complementary) indicated his strong suspicion that the complementarity interpretation of quantum mechanics might someday be expanded into a generalized principle. It now appears that such a principle has been found in metastability which appears at the scale of living things. Metastability has been proposed as a principle of brain~behavior, and...
LECTURE ABSTRACT – by J. A. Scott Kelso This lecture comes in three “movements” and arises out of a new book (Kelso, J. A. S. & D. A. Engstrom, The Complementary Nature, (2006 MIT Press). The first movement explores the central role of ubiquitous “contrarieties” in the history of ideas (both in philosophy and science). We refer to all such contrarieties as “complementary pairs”...
