Can someone help me here? What does “fractal” add to Integral thinking when we talk about “fractal Integral thinking”?
one way to consider this … is
when looking at an internal or external construct be it an experiential memory or societal meme or governance rules. They self perpetuate within themselves and continue to do so unless consciously brought into awareness. Constructs with fractal life.
Lets say at 5 years old I get an ethnocentric view imprinted -> it can reappear at 10 -> at 17 etc. I may or may not shift even if the context switches coz I will “fractally” continue to elicit the memory unless awareness of it shifts. The needed meta-awareness usually “forced” by a negative event/ strategic behaviour creates a pressure to shift. It’s usually a game-theoretic response but not necessarily or not intentionally anyway.
So – if I elicit a view or environmentally triggered from a particular colour e.g. lets say tribal then it will continue run as long as it internally is accepted as a rule influencing perceptual filter/ frame/ relative truth. Or lets say I externally participate in at as an prediction model-- assumption/ presupposition/ habituated response as conditioned by environment included other people the fractal construct will still perpetuate.
wordy response but one way to view the intersection of fractals and integral is seeing it as memory that doesn’t have a time limit so will run forever like a video on loop. The specific view on memory is from Robert Johansson the application to this context and interpretation is mine. Can take the question in other directions too. And I’m mostly pointing pre-teal too for reasons beyond the scope of the question.
1 Like
h.a Thank you for taking the time and effort to provide a considered response. I suppose I wasn’t clear enough in my question - my bad - as to the direction I was heading. I had always seen the word “fractal” as a noun - despite the “al” at the end of the word. Hence fractal integral thinking to me was, for example, like saying piano integral music.
However on reflecting upon your kind response I went back to fractal and considered what it would mean if it were an adjective rather than a noun.
Let’s look at one definition of fractal as a noun: “a fractal is a self-similar subset of Euclidean space whose fractal dimension strictly exceeds its topological dimension.” A bit like the TARDIS - bigger on the inside than on the outside.
Again: " any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape to a given larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size."
So we can then say that a line of development is a fractal.
Looking at racism, for example. We can see racism within a person, a society, a culture at the red level of development of each of these systems. We can do a thorough horizontal exploration of racism without ever needing to step outside that red system. Yet as we bring it into our awareness at red we can begin to see how racism doesn’t only exist at red it exists at other levels e.g. green. Racism has started to be bigger on the inside than on the outside.
So we look at racism at green. Lo and behold at this magnification it is similar in shape to racism in red. There is nothing in racism at green that contradicts racism at red. And so we do a horizontal exploration at green and see racism is wholly incorporated within green, yet bigger than green and so we magnify again.
It’s the same all the way up and all the way down.
So, I guess fractal integral thinking is not different from integral thinking, it just emphasises the need to remember that whatever we might be looking at, not to privilege any particular perspective as it is the same all the way up and all the way down.
h.a. thanks again for your reply, it has helped me enormously.