User:DennisRivers

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RECURSION IN SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTEXTS: PROCESSES THAT FOLD BACK UPON THEMSEVES

Dialogues about dialogues in a recursive universe -- started by Dennis Rivers, MA

I am a communication skills scholar and trainer, and I locate myself as trying to understand and develop the body of work done by scholars such as Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Gregory Bateson.

There is a bit of a creative tension in Wikipedia's desire to cover the world of factual knowledge and the desire to be "encylopedic," that is, to cover everything. Because "everything" includes not only what we have created up to now, but also our creative and communal trial and error at the edge of the unknown. That creative process is a fact of human life, although I would certainly agree that it is a different sort of fact than dates or maps or biographies. Wikipedia, it seems to me, is wrestling with the very worthwhile issue of how do we know what is worth knowing. Bateson would say, the pattern that connects the facts to some larger process can't be found by examining each fact separately. But such knowledge about patterns is much more subject to contention. Certainty and significance seem to be inversely related in human life. The more existentially important a topic is, the less reliable our is knowledge about it. This is really obvious in my field, interpersonal communication.

As my communication teaching has evolved over the past thirty years, I have become more and more aware that we humans live and breathe in a web of endless recursion: the processes that are important to us fold back on themselves, sometimes several times, sometimes as far as the eye can see or mind can reach.

For example, I am continually trying to help myself and others:

  listen to how we listen

  have little conversations about the bigger conversations we want to have

  consciously express our patterns of self-expression

  ask questions about the questions we ask: which ones and styles are the more fruitful?

  be more grateful for our capacity to be grateful

  put on our do-list the creation of a better do-list

  learn better how to learn better

And between people, and also between nations, there are plenty of feedback loops, to the point that I have adopted the position that "all behavior is instruction and invitation." Whatever I am doing, I am showing you how to do and inviting you to do. The new research on mirror neurons helps explain how this works. Now the challenge is to see whether we can keep from blowing ourselves up here on Planet Earth in a fit of feedback gone haywire. (World War One began partly from an escalating spiral of defensive troop mobilizations, each of which was easily mistaken by the other nations as preparation to attack. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war_one#Plans.2C_distrust_and_mobilization)

Those are probably enough examples. I think this continual looping makes us very creative, but also unstable and prone to stampedes. I explore these themes in my book The Geometry of Dialogue. Both of my two, recursion-oriented, books on interpersonal communication are available free of charge in PDF format at www.newconversations.net.

I hope other people working in this area will chime in and expand our knowledge about how people chime in.