Model of Hierarchical Complexity

Context

Cory David Barker on the Metamodern Forum:

"my take is that post-modernity is inability to coordinate paradigms beyond the relativism transition step. How it works, is that the people at paradigmatic stage about ideologies who cannot transition beyond the relativism transition step and coordinate the apparent disparities, assume that their coordinative limit necessitates that knowledge is relative. These folks then proclaim this, and ideology gets downward assimilated into lower stage coordinations by their audience, and the audience who inherits the ideas cannot reconcile the paradigmatic disparities because they are trying to coordinate a problem that requires coordinate at one or more magnitudes of complexity higher than they are capable of performing.

The current problem requires integral, unified models that fit together paradigms cross-paradigmatically. Michael’s notion of meta-cross paradigmatic is a different kind of “meta” and should not be confused with meta-systematic. In the MHC schema, correspondence of unified models is an expression of meta-cross paradigmatic performance. The meta-cross paradigmatic stages produces principles, paradigmatic coordinates the principles of a given domain, and cross-paradigmatic stage corresponds the paradigms by their principles. Meta-cross paradigmatic performance has to do with large-scale congruencies across cross-paradigmatic coordinations. Even there, we hit the relativism step since the step exists fractally at all stages, but us folks who coordinate between unifying models at the largest scale know either concisely or intuitively from developing through the paradigmatic relativism transition with the coordination of a wide array of paradigmatic content, is that “relativism” is actually just part of the process of fitting together ideas and actions until a higher order coordination is discovered, which which produces a higher order equilibrium “absolute”. (April 2021)

Description

From a review by Russ Volckmann of

- a special triple issue of Ervin Laszlo’s World Futures, Vol. 64 Nos. 05–07 (2008): Postformal Thought and Hierarchical Complexity with Guest Editors Michael Lamport Commons and Sara Nora Ross.

Michael Commons:

“The Model of Hierarchical Complexity…offers a standard method of examining the universal patterns of evolution and development. It is a quantitative behavioral developmental theory…There are two kinds of hierarchical complexity. The commonly recognized one refers to the ubiquitous linear hierarchies that are described in many fields of study. These are descriptive. By contrast, the Model of Hierarchical Complexity offers a standard method of examining the nonlinear activity of constructing the universal patterns of evolution and development. It accounts for evolution and development by recognizing their patterns are comprised of tasks, or actions, performed at specified orders of hierarchical complexity. Whereas the Model’s unidimensional measure is linear, the tasks it measures are nonlinear performances, as this special issue conveys. The nonlinear activity of tasks is that of organizing, or coordinating, information. Hierarchical complexity applies to any events or occasions in which information is organized. The kinds of entities that organize information include humans and their biological systems as well as their social organizations, non-human organisms, and machines, including computers.”

“The hierarchical complexity of tasks, or actions, is defined in words as follows. Actions at a higher order of hierarchical complexity: (a) are themselves defined in terms of actions at the next lower order of hierarchical complexity; (b) organize and transform the lower-order actions; (c) produce organizations of lower-order actions that are new and not arbitrary. These next higher order actions cannot be accomplished by those lower-order actions alone.” (http://www.integralleadershipreview.com/archives/2009-01/2009-01-review-dunoon-ross-volckmann.php)