A model of interactors Part 1

Interaction with general environment

The cliological frameworks are essentially systems models; the noam framework inherits the properties provided by general systems theory. An individual, organism, organisation, or machine, is within an environment and interacts with its environment across a permeable systems boundary. There is an outside world consisting of other systems which could be living, social, or otherly. The noam itself pertains to the inside world of the considered system. A noam is a viewpoint of a class of idea, and is intended to highlight control and decision mechanisms: it is a cybernetic model. It could be in the mind of an individual, the policies and procedures of an organisation, or in the software running a machine. The noam model abstracts away from the actual form of the system (eg a person) to focus on how interactive behaviours are arrived at. While a noam can be thought of as a specific form of idea (much like a meme is a specific form of idea), a noam encompasses sensation, values, beliefs, capabilities, decisions, actions and learning. It provides a way of looking at cyclic processes.

The symbolism herein for the noam is that of the Phoenician “nun”, or V). The environment is denoted by the Greek “chi”, or χ, which is positioned above the noam symbol, possibly with a dashed line indicating the system’s boundary. In such a depiction, that which is above the dashed line is environmental, while that below is within the system. The interaction between the noam and the environment can be drawn using a pair of arrows showing the input from the environment into the system, and the output, behavioural response of the system to the environment.

[Equivalent FSM/Flowchart/Code] seperate post

Interaction with the noams of others

While the noam model is capable of portraying interactions with a natural environm

ent, it comes into its own when interactions with other noams are considered. These could be other noams within the individual or noams of other people. Organisational interaction is an extension. In such an analysis, we become focussed on the interaction, or communication, between the noams, rather than the actual people. The dynamics are cyclic as each person is a constituent of the environment of the other. The simplest model is that of a dyad, or pair of people interacting – for both persons, the output from one person’s noam is the input to the noam of the other. A typical analysis would focus on one person in the dyad (other analyses are possible). There are various means of depicting this interaction, but a convenient symbolic reduction is to draw the target person’s noam as usual “V)” but place an inverted “ω” over the V shape (aka sad bunny, floptipus symbol)- the result indicates an interpersonal communication between two people, or rather, their noams. This is a special varient of an ineraction with a general environment which may not include the noams of others and would not have the inverted-omega.

perceptual positions

Pronouns, such as I, You, They (and their plurals) are indexes to the person, or persons, being referred to. These perceptual positions are often called the first, second, or third person. As perceptual positions are important to the cliological frameworks, then they are elaborated upon. A person’s index to another person can be denoted, as can a long chain of indices. This is done using dot notation: for example, if you were talking about me then that index would be 2.2, whereas if someone else was referring to themselves, then that would be 3.1. Long chains are possible such as 3.2.2.1. Common positions in cliological analysis are 3.1 and 3.2: a target abstract person under analysis, and the person they are interacting with. A noam diagram places the identity of the noam’s operator within the V shape, which could be in dot notation or just some label.  The 3.1 and 3.2 types of interaction are common and can be shown simply using the “V)” and inverted “ω” notation without any indexing.

Interaction with the self

The noam has a variety of features, but at its heart is a kind of belief, a belief about an instruction (herin called an instruct) on what to do when presented with a situation. This instruct is formed from values, capability and prior experience. Individuals maintain a vast array of noams and these noams are under constant review. Sometimes, however, a noam may not be able to achieve satisfaction. It is here that other noams that the individual has, come to their assistance. A common situation is being blocked from doing something through lack of an essential resource. Obviously then, the agent would need to acquire that resource first in order to do the thing they originally intended to do. This can become quite a long chain of activities – a “scintillating witches” kind of situation. Were one to solve the problem of having long grass, then a lawnmower must be obtained, which might involve going out and purchasing one, which would require having the funds, which might be obtained through work and so on; or you could just pave it over, which would have a different chain of actions. This form of inter-noamic interaction might be called acquisitional. One noam (termed the front-line noam) calls upon another so as to acquire what it needs to operate; acquisitional noams may further call other acquisitional noams and  so on. This would continue in a regress until some acquisitional noam down the chain fulfils its obligation and returns the acquired resources to the caller. That caller can return its results to its caller, and so on back up the chain to the front-line noam and the individual can then do what they set out to do. In practice, the structure of acquisition would be more like a tree: the kind of top-down stepwise refinement used in computer programming. [more detail]

Acquisition often involves tools, or know-how, or knowing what to do; or knowing how to find such out. These are the kappa point on the upper left corner of the noam; from the 3MVW3 memory aid, they are also mark the means by which to do something, that is “mission, method and materiel”. Generally, knowing what to do, how to do it, and have the resources to do so, are necessary to do something; without them, doing that something becomes somewhat frustrated. Hence, to release that frustration and unblock the cloggage, it is usually a case of having to step back and obtain the missing building blocks.

Provision: aquisition from others

A variation on the acquisitional noam is the provident noam. The provident noam acts in almost the same way, but is done by another person rather than the sample individual – that other person provides some resource that the individual doesn’t have but needs. Commercial activity, the entire global economy, is premised around this. In this modern era of complex manufacturing, almost all acquisition will involve the provision by some other party somewhere along the chain. Provident noams come in two basic flavours: that of push and that of pull. Pull refers to where the agent seeks to acquire some resource from another party. This could be through purchase, barter, imitation, theft and so on. Push, on the other hand, is where that other party is providing the individual with some resource, such as a school providing textbooks or the military issuing weapons. In practice, the push/pull distinction is arbitrary as there will be an element of both depending on what perspective is taken on a transaction – however the dominant intention or most fungible resource in the exchange suggests what view might be taken.

Darwinian bottom line

On the surface (of an interaction) the inputs and outputs are modelled with respect to values. Noams can form a kind of supply chain, whereby the acquisition of resources is done at the surface level through interactions, or transactions, with the environment. However, axiology, the philosophical study of values, which has been backed up by positive psychology, suggests that some values are more foundational and support surface values. In other words, it is not a case of having one layer of values, but, as in the noam model, multiple layers. This reflects the technique of finding core values whereby the question “What is important about that?” is asked repeatedly and recursively. When done, the superficial values are peeled away to reveal the deeper, and usually more motivating values. Money, for many people, is not the value in itself but can be about what it provides, such as security. In other words, noams are driven by a hierarchy of values. Often, in a chain of acquisition, the nomes are driven by the same few core values.

Core values may differ from individual to individual, although overlap is very common. Below the individual core values, at the very foundation, is what might be termed the Darwinian Bottom Line – or the Omega value Ω (a nod to Teilhard de Chardin). Here, the same values of survival and reproduction become common to all lifeforms, and for that matter, replicators. However, the concept of “value” and “purpose” shift away from their superficial meaning, and into more philosophical territory around teleology and dysteleology.

Symbolism

There is a whole symbolic language built around the cliological frameworks which look somewhere between organic chemistry and alchemic glyphs. The semblance is fitting as alchemy, as the forerunner of chemistry, is about structure and transformation. Furthermore, memes are about structure, which has the analogue of the molecular chemistry of DNA. The symbolism does represent a mathematical system. However, it is intended as a kind of shorthand: an engineering schematic for apprehending the substrate of culture. For this reason, the purity of a mathematical system is downplayed in favour of what the picture tells us. A totally coherent system may be possible but is deliberately avoided as it would lead to distracting pedantry rather than teasing out the complexities of the actual phenomenon under scrutiny. Another distinction between the representation of cliological and mathematical ideas is that cliological symbols, for the most part, are functional symbols rather than arbitrary tokens. In other words, the adopted symbol has some inherent resemblance or relationship to the object it depicts. This is why the familiar Latin and Greek alphabets have been supplemented by older writing systems such as Phoenecian: the W) symbol comes from the Phoenician “meem”, which in turn comes from the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for water – depicting ripples; this is now our modern letter M. In a sense, the ripples can be seen metaphorically as waves of information that propagate as memes across culture.

a taxonomy of archetypes

While primarliy intended as an engineering schematic, the cliological framworks also provide a symbol set and a grammar by which to model real world cases and manipulate the representation in order to develop hypotheses – to develop novel noams and memes.

The primitive symbols, just as with an alphabet, can be combined and arranged in various ways which have well-formedness, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. They can be built up into representations that can be seen as the equivalent of words, sentences, paragraphs and so on. A linguistic construction hierarchy is build into the cliological frameworks: toulmin, fabula, noam, meme, cliome. The system can be seen from a structuralist perspective, it provides paradigms for narrative. A retronym for NOAM is Narrative Object Analysis Model; this reflects the idea of Object Orientation (OO) being used in the analysis and design of functional narratives – stories that are essentially instructional.

Common patterns emerge which cover a range of instances; these mostly involve acquisition and interaction. There is a hierachial clustering going on and therefore such patterns can be arranged systematically, according to structure, into a taxonomy: a Linnean approach to cultural information. A set of architypes can be identified and arranged according to some parallel with biological taxonomic ranks. These archetypes are not only useful in positioning a particular noam, meme or cliome case, but moreover, in the development of designer cultural code that is intended for a specific purpose. Marketing, Advertising, Promotion, PR & Sales (MAPPS) provide a clear field for instigating this taxonomy. The most obvious applications for influencing culture are commercial: that of shfiting brand perceptions en mass, thereby retailing more goods. Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) as a method of producing sales through using existing social networks has been [discussed]. There is a diversity of specific compensations plans in and around MLM, but they point to a general pattern which might be considered as both an archetype and a template for constructing new MLM schemes. Other initiatives, such as raising environmental awareness, may be informed by looking at another branch of the taxonomy.

Building on noams: memes

In the cliological frameworks, noams are built from fabula elements, which in turn are built from toulmin elements. Noams go on to build memes, which further go on to build cliomes. This hierachy of construction is covered elsewhere, but it is adding to the noam-meme relationship here. Cliology, in forming a system for influencing culture, is principled on the spread of informtion, and therefore has memes at its heart. Noams are important, but they are considered to be just a building block in the assembly of memes. At the noamic level, the focus in on the individual, or individuals, in an interaction. This is the stuff of conventional communication and psychology studies. To move to the memetic is to shift focus to a populational level. Of course, a population consists of individuals and so noams remain meaningful. However, choosing to address the individual or populational, depends on the scope we are interested in; the interest of cliology is populational. As argued, an engineering perspective of memetics considers a meme to consist of two noams: a payload and a carrier.

The symbol system is extended to accommodate the two noams of a meme: a meme essentially being a replicating noam. It is at this level that the benefit of a Linnean taxonomy of archetypes becomes beneficial for cliology as the archetypes may be deployed as templates for fabricating novel memes for specified intentions.