Just Bru

Finally back to the office. I just opened my laptop and distributed on the desk all notes, business cards, a few bills, train and plane tickets from my last trip to London to attend BlogWalk 4.
My mind also is iterating through all the faces, places, and interesting discussions we had.

I should definitely start organizing BlogWalk notes, but some meta-consideration evolved during these days and I need to write it down before considering anything else.
While looking at the Window Wiki at the second floor of the Old Crown in New Oxford st. I saw one of the post-it fall down, like a dead leaf from the window. Like a dead leaf, or a snow flake.
Snow flakes are something that always captured my imagination. Two connections instantly pop up in my mind:
- one of the final sequences of the movie "Nirvana", by Gabriele Salvatores, and the narrating voice saying "Come un fiocco di neve che non cade in nessun posto" (like a snowflake, falling nowhere).
- some passages of Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science, describing the chaotic process of snowflakes formation.

Post-its, categorization, knowledge mapping, emergent order, snow, post-its, categorization, knowledge...

I was looking for the whole in the part. And that's what chaos theory is (also) about... finding simple models for reality, since simple systems can lead to "common" complex behaviours, and thus there must be laws that make order "emerge" from disorder in very different types of systems, laws that are not dependent on specific context (finance, ecology, weather...).

Of Maps

There is a general attitude toward believing the more complex and detailed the model the better it has to be. There's something wrong with that: suppose you're in a city and want to map it. You can think of building a perfect map of it, a map that contains all alleys, lamp-posts, people, and even city maps in it... such a map (even if it could actually be done) would be as huge as the city itself ;)

So what? Map is not the territory, and we all know that.
Yet, a map is darn useful if you know what to look for, and the map is simple enough or, better, it honestly fit your purpose.
Take as an example a mad rush to using public transport to catch an airplane that is going to take off on the airport on the opposite side of the city... I wouldn't care about turistic attraction near each station of the tube, but rather I'd like to have a visualization system that isn't even based on geographic distances, but on the time needed to get from one point to the other...

Of SnowFlakes

During winter (and if you live on the top of a mountain, not only in winter ;) ), water particles in the air join the cold wind, make a nice cocktail "on the rocks", and become subject to variable combination of temperature, pressure, speed, spin and the like. All of this variables, combined with dimension, shape and superficial tension (and probably more characteristics I don't know) of the particles aggregate, determines the "what" (shape) "where" (location/extension) and "when" (growth) of new "spikes" (Dendrite). This happens many times during the lifetime of a snowflake leading to the formation of different "layers" of crystal and making it impossible to predict the eventual shape of the showflake. Moreover, the number of variables at plat make sure that it's really hard to find two identical showflakes. Nevertheless, flakes are small enough that all variables can be considered to have roughly the same value in all the points of a fiven flake, leading to almost perfect simmetry in all of them.

Like a snowflake, falling nowhere...

Let's go back to the idea of simple models for complex systems: how can a crystal of snow be a model for human beings?

Of Man

So, let's suppose people are like very complex, carbon based snowflakes. Things like geneticss, social pressure, environment, food, all of these excercise their influence on the individual, stratifying layers over layers of behaviours, but the variability of these elements is so wide, that it's impossible to predict how an individual will, in the end, react to a certain input.

So, from a hypothethic - not formal at all - "chaos psychology" point of view (actually I just made a google on Chaos Psychology, and discovered plenty of studies and papers on the subject... just downloaded some for future reading), let's consider a man who does not like the way his personality "crystal" is growing up. What could he do?
I see two probblems here:

• The Future: creating "good" or "nice" layers from now on
• The Past: deconstructuring the old, unwanted ones

The obvious solution to the first problem would be to work on the variables, "fine tuning" them to the desired structure. This is something we already do in our everyday life, for example when we start a diet to loose weight.
There's a trap though because we are just considering one variable at a time, forgetting about the whole picture.
So in the end I'll probably loose weight, almost certainly becoming unbalanced in some other aspect of my personality (either will start to smoke, talk a lot, or maybe stop talking at all...)
What to do then? How to get a map of all these variables?
There's actually a huge literature on this: starting from Socrate's Know yourself (featured even in the Matrix), to NLP, to Gurdjieff and most Eastern Philosophy states that global understanding of inner cycles, behaviours, procedures is a central point in dealing with life itself.
What I think is that the best way to accomplish that is taking notes of every reaction and expected or unexpected behaviour of ours, in order to complete the puzzle of our inner world.
This puzzle, or map, has a couple of interesting characteristics:

• it is fuzzy, since none of the behaviour are absolute (i.e. never say never...)
• it is dynamic, since different pieces (behaviours) can move to different position (condition), grow, shrink, flip upside down, adjusting to inner feedback and the everchanging context...

Unsurprisingly enough, this study (that could take some time) should be done without actually modify anything, but just taking note of all the attributes of the context:
So what happens when I sleep 6 hours instead of eight? And what if I kept doing this for a few days? Am I at home or not? Did I eat well, bad, too little, too much? What kind of thoughts do I have? And so on...

Problem number two (deconstructuring old layers) is a little more complicated.
It is about breaking old habits, in a way that new, healthier ones can becreated. Going back to our snowflake metaphor, it would be like catching a gust of hot air (or maybe a sunray) that would melt a few layers, so that they can be remade under new conditions...

So, what can make this melting happen inside us? Some references come to my mind:
buddhist concept of Samsara for example, and the connected idea that what we preceive as "reality" is just an illusion, and that real freedom comes from realizing that those tricky "joys" of the world we know are actually chains in disguise. Other examples can be found in other major religions, but a really interesting reference can be found in Ascetism: this word comes from the greek askesis (exercise), and represent the ultimate effort to reach perfection, bending the soul toward the others, and stretching it from ground to heaven...
One thing is easy to notice at this point: all these references are coming from all religious traditions of the world. On one side, this is quite obvious, but nevertheless, this is quite far from my everyday life icons and facts. How to measure something I don't know?

So I wonder if there are examples of this kind of "exercises" in different fields, professions, hobbies or whatsoever, or if, on the contrary, this "reshaping of crystals" is open only to those who choose to devote their life to religious matters. Once again I seek the help of chaos, looking for context independent patterns...

Of Actors

The first coming to my mind is the actors' training: When I decided to study theatre, early lessons have neem just about learning to "listen". Listen t your body, listen to your voice, listen even to your thoughts. Only then comes the time to learn to do things in a new way: the way of the character you've to play. Most of the work of Stanislavski (or at least what I remember of it) is about this:

1. learning to live the emotion, vision and feelings of the character, and
2. learning to use the body as the ultimate tool since "emotional life is a kind of two-way street", and "there is never a direct line to emotions in performance, only to the body".

The theatre of Grotowski, focused on the notion of "Poor Theatre", was maybe even more focused on becoming a pathway to understanding. In fact, he declared that theatre should not, because it could not, compete against the overwhelming spectacle of film and should instead focus on the very root of the act of theatre: actors in front of spectators.

Jerzi Grotowski

by gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, communion.

So, by learning how to wear (and, even moreso, un-wear) masks and costumes, the actor learns (if he wants) both to take a distance from what shines around and inside him, eventually "cleaning" his inner image of all the bells and whistles, and thus creating what Shannon or information theorists would address as a less noisy channel ;)

In the end, this approach to theatre teaches you to resist your vanity and pride, and the natural identification in the role which would result in creating an hybrid monster (made up of your own personality merged with your personal interpretation of the character), and to surrender instead to lean towards the audience, in order to listen to it and understand their current needs, expectations and belies, eventually wearing (building) the "best" mask to transmit that specific feeling, emotion, or vision. As St.Paul would say "being Greek with Greeks and Roman with Romans" (or going back to information theory, choose the best encoding scheme for the receiver).

To be or not to be... what?

Now the question is: is this pattern belonging only to actors and playing, or is there a set of professions identifiable as something like "evolutive professions" that allow this kind of self-restructuring process? If so, how large is this set, and how to identify its boundaries (i.e. what are the necessary/sufficient characteristics to belong to it?).

Let's start from the latter. What makes the difference? At first sight, it seems that the answer is to be sought in the focus on communicating with an audience: this could bring to a generalization of this set to include all arts since, no matter how wide or narrow the channel is (for example actors can rely on a much wide communication channel with their audience than musicists or painters), he/she will have to go through this process of bending (cleaning up the channel) to the message and listen to (properly encode for) the audience.
But this is a dead-end, interesting but not general enough, and leading away from the pattern estabilished, for example, by hermits and ascetists, whose main focus is not transmitting data to a public "outside", but to a very special "inner" public, being it wether God himself or themeselves.

This way we can generalise a lot by eliminating the dependence on the external audience, and we are left with this "focus on channel/communication" common characteristic.
So we could think that professions dealing with communication in general have this "evolutive" potential to be exploited, while others do not.
This is already a remarkable improvements from the starting assumptions: we now have a fairly good choice of professions/activities that will let's re-shape ourselves :)

To boldly go where no man has gone before

Now, let's try to go one step further: we all know that every activity involves some degree of communication, always with self (e.g. if I have to start doing something), and possibly with others (through direct or indirect contact). So, if we can get rid of the "focus on" part of the statement, we'll have that all activities actually are equally good tools/labs/playground to work on self.

But how to get rid of it???

So we have that, no matter what we do, things we are doing can be used for reshaping our image/personality/self.
The general path for achieving this requires moving "why we do things" from doing things because we need (either recognition, money, whatever), to doing things out of passion, to doing things following a vision (plan).
On the "what we do?" extension instead, it's about moving from doing something just because it's fun, to make the safest choice, to doing things "right", to doing "right thing" :)

Open Questions

Following questions have been left open both to give place to discussion and because it's 3 o'clock in the morning and I need sleep ;)

1. Are there any differences between activities focused on "evolution", those focused on "communication", and others? If so, where's the advantage?
2. This discussion is based on linear logic, and thus doesn't consider the fuzzy factor of real life, where nobody's dedicated to just "one" activity 24/7. How this influences the model?

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