DAVID A. ENGSTRØM - In Squigglespeak posts, we talk about the squiggle sign (~), and give examples of its use by ourselves and others…
The Squiggle (~) Symbol:
“The squiggle (~) is our symbol connecting contraries and other mutually and inextricably connected events, processes, etc. …
The squiggle symbol is dynamic. It’s symbolism is includes both timeless and of time qualities. It expresses the hard won fact (yes, fact) that complementary pairs are dynamic; that they exhibit coordination dynamics that includes multistability, gradual and abrupt change, instability, metastability…all reflective of both stability and change.
Coordination dynamics is the scientific grounding of the squiggle. It shows how certain complementary pairs (squiggles) may arise, stabilize and transform in time. Thus, among its other messages, (~) is a symbol of real phenomena as well as their mathematical and scientific understanding. Not justmetaphor, not just an association. But actual demonstrable, observable phenomena.
We also suspect that the humanawareness of TCN of complementary pairs or ‘squiggle sense’ is active, that this awareness is also entailed and expressed via coordination dynamics. Thus, both observer and observed appear to obey coordination dynamics, and thus coordination dynamics gives us a way to understand the observer~observing in surprising new ways.
Notice, observer and observed are dynamic, coexistent and inextricable complementary aspects, whose complementary nature can be readily expressed as observer~observed. This complementary pair or ‘squiggle’ by its use of the squiggle symbol, communicates that both observer and observed engender coordination dynamics individually and collectively speaking.
One Response to “Squigglespeak of the Day”
I came across this in Prigogine & Stengers’ (1984) well-known book “Order out of Chaos” (order ~chaos, of course, being a complementary pair in CD and of TCN):
“Various possible languages and points of view about the same system may be complementary…The irreducible plurality of perspectives on the same reality expresses the impossibility of a divine point of view from which the whole of reality is visible. However, the lesson of the principle of complementarity is not a lesson in resignation [Scott Kelso likes this
]…The real lesson to be learned from the principle of complementarity…consists in emphasizing the wealth of reality, which overflows any single language, any single logical structure. Each language can express only part of reality. Music, for example, has not been exhausted by any of its realizations, by any style of composition, from Bach to Schoenberg” (p.225).
I should just remark that even in elementary coordination dynamics, depending on the where the system ‘lives’, its current context, we have the logic of the either/or (bistability) and the logic of both/and and neither/nor (metastability).