I appreciate the introduction of "roles" and "topics" and "attractors"
here. I would say that *I* experience all three slightly differently:
Roles: This subdivides into (roughly?) 3 modes
1. Roles I was born/raised into... Son, brother, classmate, boyfriend,
husband, father. These were handed to me by the culture I "became
me" in. I may have been mildly more self-aware and some might say
cynical in my living/experiencing/elaborating these roles.
2. Roles I adopted more consciously... Friend, Student,
Employee/Subordinate, Researcher, Technologist, Businessman, etc.
These roles are modeled after the ones I saw, but I believe my
engagement with them exceeded some threshold of self-awareness to
become self-intention. Each of these roles might have supspecie.
3. Roles such as I think Glen refers to, roles adopted in a very
transient mode... understanding I'm doing so for a specific purpose
in a specific context for (nominally) a very limited time....
fellow traveler, cynic, seducer, authoritarian, submissive, pleader,
demander, ranter, raver, etc...
Topics: I believe these are orthogonal to Roles and I can approach any
topic from the point of view of one of the roles, or perhaps
vice-versa. Topics generally subdivide as follows for me:
1. Personal. Things that have an immediate and *personal* meaning to
me. These are mostly about self-image, psychological and emotional
states, physical states, immediate intimate relations, etc.
2. Public. These things tend to fall into the arena of (possibly well
informed) opinions such as politics, religion, aesthetic
preferences, etc.
3. Technical. These things generally fall in to the categories of
Science or Technology... things which can be studied and much
derived from "first principles". These things (in principle) can be
tested in something like an objective mode. The "soft sciences" are
getting "harder" all the time as they take on more mathematical
rigor, as we live and study them longer we have more formal models
for them, as we discover/develop new measurement technologies which
were presumed to be out of reach in the past (e.g. fMRI, crypto,
big-data analysis, etc.)
Attractors: I take these to be the psychosocial context in which I
discover these roles (and role-topic pairs?) and my relation to them.
The larger culture is where these attractors (in particular the
born/raised roles (1)) exist. Type 2 Roles are usually more context
specific, based in some subculture experience and therefore the
attractors are more dependent on the sub-context. Type 3 Roles seem to
have the most restrictive attractors, depending more on my own
psychosocial context than perhaps the others, or maybe more to the
point, those contexts are more idiosyncratic to me. They are more
likely to be adopted transiently and therefore have less investment and
equally I feel the "attractors" are more sweeping... there is a lot more
"acting as if" or "fake it til you make it" for me in this domain. I
might enter a conversation for example, not intending to be a cynic, but
quickly find myself drawn into it by my conversant's adopting a
Pollyanna role, for example.
- Steve
On 1/15/19 12:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Marcus,
Would you be happier if we called them "attractors". Surely you, stalwart
individualist that you are, would agree that there is something out there
that "attracts you" to certain lines of behavior in social situations?
Or perhaps not?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2019 11:27 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Few of you ...
Glen writes:
< It's truly a breath of fresh air when I run across someone else who is
willing to swap roles several times through a single conversation. >
Why do there have to be roles and not just topics?
Marcus
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