Participatory Inquiry, episode 152: Social Cognition

“In a network, social cognition, at win^n scale.”
@johnkellden

Social Cognition
How people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.

Social Interaction

“Social interaction is the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved (though the latter’s scope can be augmented or reduced).”
— Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo

Social Graph
Circles of friends and acquaintances, digitally augmented and evolving through our circles of concern, influence and confluence.

Circle of Concern and Influence
A Circle of Concern encompasses the wide range of concerns we have, such as our health, our children, problems at work, the amount of government borrowing, or the threat of war.

A Circle of Influence encompasses those concerns that we can do something about. They are concerns that we have some control over.

Circle of Confluence
More than two thousand years ago, there was a confluence of two ideas:

- the alphabet, invented by the phoenicians
- the idea of progress, the idea that we could become better than our parents

Data
In a network, data is the intersect of will and intelligence, will turned flow and performance. Warm data is data cultivated in a context of dialogue, learning, generativity, mutuality, play, nature and connectivity. Next-gen digital platforms, can be designed to both honor digital identity and support open data ecosystems.

Identity
At the center of our circles is our notions of selfhood, service and synthesis. Our personal self exists in a state of imaginative, generative tension with our essential character and evolutionary purpose. Our desire to game our environment for our own advantage, is guided by how we perceive the world, orient ourselves in it, decide and take thought and action. Our levelling up in our game of life, can be outlined by win, win-win and win-win-win.

Win^n
A generative sequence, from win, to win-win, to win-win-win. Generative sequences are sets of (playable) patterns, producing structure-preserving transformation.

the times they are a changin

Information
Information is the intersect of situational awareness and will turned flow.
Ie, without data supporting, wireframing our information, there’s a risk with information too selectively sifted and sorted, reinforcing our own separate, separative, polarizing will. In a digital conversation, uninformed opinion as one of the common patterns.

Knowledge
Knowledge is the intersect of imagination and situational awareness, with our own and others’ existing behavior the core constraint and, should we so choose, providing us with ample opportunity to learn, unlearn and relearn.

Wisdom
Wisdom is the intersect of intelligence and imagination. If our behavior is too much of a constraint, to the detriment of our imagination, the intersect of intelligence and imagination becomes polarized, conflicted, resisted and in extreme cases, non-existent. The generative review of wisdom is ability.

“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

Wise Playground
Wise playground, is a confluence of four ideas: impact investing, next-gen social network, decentralized autonomous organization and practical wisdom. It is designed to scale to 300k humans, forming small groups, with intelligence augmentation and knowledge allocation (insight markets) where conversations that mind and matter at network scale, turn intelligence into ability, in service to needs.

Complex Responsive Processes
A combination of interactions, conversations and transactions, combining human ingenuity and social network connectivity.

Conversations that Mind and Matter
A subset of conversations, enabling knowledge leverage and navigation.

Graph
Structures, processes and flows, out of a combination of identity, co-creation of value, intelligence augmentation, coordination of means and knowledge navigation.

Knowledge Navigation
A superset of search. Open data ecosystems, providing actionable insight(data) in service to actionable insight (story, knowledge ecosystems).

Participatory Inquiry Graph

complex responsive processes x social cognition = participatory inquiry graph

A (network) graph, is the product of processes and social cognition. Networked social cognition is how we coordinate ourselves in networks, and how we coordinate networks.

Participatory sensemaking and meaning-making
Participatory sensemaking and meaningmaking, is to community (and writ extended and over time, cultures and societies and civilizations) what participatory inquiry is to individual will, will turned flow.

Participatory sense-making An enactive approach to social cognition

“As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only.”
— Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo

Doing A POODLE
Informed and guided by the above, we have an option, to move from existing practice, to best practice and from best practice to best option. As part of such a movement, trust; trust, movement, we can extend the competitive OODA-loop to an intelligence and knowledge augmenting POODLE-loop:

OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide & Act

POODLE: Perceive, Observe, Orient, Design, Learn & (En)Act

And, in the end, the flow you instigate, is equal to the know, you make.