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People and Social System
-Engerbart and Luhmann
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We are made up from mind and body. We think that our mind has the total control of what we do. But there is a report which says that brain wave changes 0.5 seconds before our mind makes conscious decisions. This could mean that at least some decisions are made outside of the mind and it is an illusionary afterthought of mind that it is of its own decision. This illusion is a necessary one to maintain integrity of a person.
On the other hand, according to M Polanyi, explicit knowledge a mind has is gradually transferred into the tacit and body knowledge as the knowledge becomes daily habit. Thus some of our conscious decisions become unconscious decisions or even body reactions. I know a senior lady who draws good pictures even though her mind capabilities are weak. In her case, I have to believe that it is not her mind but the body that has the knowledge of how to draw. Thus Polanyi suggests that knowledge is transferred from explicit to tacit to body. This is the reverse direction of the knowledge transfer of Nonaka where tacit or body knowledge affects explicit knowledge. This will mean that explicit, tacit and body knowledge are interacting in both directions and making decisions necessary for the integrity of a person. We can think of our day to day actions as the results of fine and consecutive decisions we make continuously by this decision mechanism. But then who is responsible for our feeling that it is me who is responsible for all the decisions we make. It will be possible because of the existence of the meta-mind that generates the illusion in our mind.

Now we have somewhat defined the internal mechanism of a person in making decisions, but then we know that our personal decisions are not necessarily made exclusively internal to a person. We have countless occasions we decide to do when personally do not want to do. This is because we live in an environment where we have social rules and cultures that affect our decisions. This means that our mind is not only bound by the internal system of a person, but also affected by the outside environment. Even though the decision-making mechanism of our mind is such, we have modeled ourselves as the one who makes decisions autonomously and our social system is constructed accordingly. In this social model, people are included as a whole in the system meaning a person is the element of the social system. It has an underlying assumption that the social system is loose enough and people are strong enough to secure the personal freedom it needs for the personal integration against the controlling power of the system. But actually the power of the social system is getting stronger and individuals are loosing the power necessary to secure its freedom. If we continue to follow this path, our society will drive people to be a functional machine like a robot. It's time to change the way we construct our society.

N Luhmann came up with a new idea of the social system where he defines communication as the element of the system. In this model, only individual's mind becomes coupled to the social system that are made up of many social sub-systems. The social sub-systems interact with individual's mind via communication. As the result, individual's mind gets vertically divided into sub-minds corresponding to the social sub-systems. It is the role of the meta-mind of the individual to maintain the integrity of vertically divided mind and the body of a person. The meta-mind tries to integrate various sub-mind affected by the social sub-systems and tries to maintain the autonomy of a person. This integration process results in the modification of the vertically divided sub-minds’ value system and in turn reflects as her/his communications to the social sub-systems. This circular connection of the mind and the social system via communication constitutes and maintains the social system. This Luhmann's social system model as seen manages not to include a person as a whole in the system. People are structurally coupled to the social system and can escape from the tight binding from the system. In order to take advantage of this system, we need to develop a person system accordingly.
Luhmann's social system consists of communication which happens at conscious mind level of a person. In order for a person system to connect to such Social System, the meta-mind of a person needs to be brought to concious level so that it reflects as communication. For modeling such a person system, I believe the Doug Engelbart’s ABC model can be expanded and be applied nicely.
Doug Engelbart structures activitis of a person in categories A and B. A activity is what we do and B is activitis to improve A. Then he adds C activity category which is to improve B. This C is a meta activity of AB and, in the past modeling, has been embedded in the AB activities. So he brought the meta category of mind into conscious mind category. This C activity frame can be used as the influencing mechanism to mindsets of a person that connects to the Social system to maintain the autonomy of a person. Also, since people as its element make an organizational system, I believe we can apply the ABC model recursively from individual to organizational hierarchy.

Reference:
Engelbart and Bootstrapping:
-ABC/NIC/Collective IQ

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