#dynamic systems theory

[hennethgalad]

ok, everyone else can go home 😆

[l-in-c-future]

AC-4 Model of Sustainable Peace

The absence of a stable peace in many areas across the globe leads to perceptions that violence and conflict are legitimate and accepted methods for problem solving and that peace cannot be sustained. Contributing to these perceptions, there remains little scientific understanding and agreement about the core dynamics and processes which contribute to sustainable peace at the intergroup level, where more stable patterns of peace and conflict are typically observed within a society.

To address this challenge, the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity developed this model to explore and study sustainable peace.

Their Sustainable Peace Project, grounded in dynamical systems theory and informed by historical and anthropological evidence indicating that humans are fundamentally cooperative beings, seeks to:

Advance conversations about peace with academic experts, policy makers, and local stakeholders;

Bridge the gap between the academic understanding and practical applications of sustainable peace by providing policy-relevant tools; and

Advocate for a more comprehensive and fundamental understanding of sustainable peace.

Further info: http://ac4.ei.columbia.edu/research-themes/dst/sustainable-peace/

[principleofplenitude]

Nancy Krieger, the epidemiologist who developed the embodiment framework, defines it as the “many different ways that we literally incorporate the world outside of us” into the biological responses in our bodies. Krieger points to studies showing that people who experience racial discrimination have higher essential hypertension and, among women, are more likely to give birth to low-weight babies. It is no mystery how this might happen. Until recently physiologists viewed the body as a self-stabilizing, or homeostatic, machine. The thought behind homeostasis was that when events cause a loss of physiological balance, the body rights itself, kind of like the shmoo dolls from my own childhood—you could keep punching them over, and they always popped back upright. Homeostasis works, conceptually, when there is an occasional stressor. But when stress never lets up, the body’s response (release of cortisol and accompanying increased heart rate and blood pressure) becomes constant, or allostatic. The body learns from past experience to respond to expected future events. Allostasis is a late twentieth–century physiological mechanism that has the potential to explain how the experiences of racism, poverty, and other social stressors become embodied as illnesses such as essential hypertension. Under constant stress, blood pressure remains elevated; immune systems stay alert. The body is always ready for the next battle. Which brings us back to breast cancer. Not only rates, but breast cancer patterns differ between black and white women. When diagnosed, black women are more likely to be under the age of 35 and to die by the age of 50. Some have argued that their tumors spread more quickly because they differ physiologically from white women. Black women tend to lack key hormone receptors, which means that tumors respond poorly to familiar hormone-based treatments.

“Bodies With Histories” from Boston Review

[sirenpsychology-blog]

I wonder what method the researchers used to trigger the PACAP protein in the participants.

Also, it'd be interesting to see if there is more demographic information about the participants... I just took a class taught by a professor who is... a huge proponent of the dynamic systems theory, and if the participants were all born and raised in inner-cities in America... I wonder how early life experiences affect the brain's pruning process, which, if I remember correctly, isn't fully completed until adolescence. Maybe the hypothesized genetic predisposition to PTSD is not actually an innate genetic predisposition, but rather a result of the pruning process. And... if the pruning process has the potential to change a person's biology, which according to the dynamic systems theory, it does, then maybe... the estrogen response element, which triggers the PACAP receptor in the gene that scientists are hypothesizing may be linked to PTSD, is only initially activated because of an abnormally pruned synaptic connection in the brain?

-EMILY

[workingthroughprocess]

Difference & Repetition: Dynamic Systems

For post-structuralists of the Deleuzian type, subjectivity is an effect of differential forces. Subjectivity is produced over and over by the relation(s) of differential forces. These forces are actual measurable things. Identity is an effect produced out of a differential field and subjectivity is an identity effect produced by the play of differential forces. These folks are hard core materialists or realists which to me means that they want to account for being through actual events/experiences that can be measured in some way rather than through a symbolic sign/signifier account of being. Knowledge needs to account for order AND novelty for the hardcore materialists, grounded in matter. Actual material processes.

If one thinks that matter is chaotic then you can't account for order. If the only way one looks at the organization of matter, any object or thing, as chaotic, having no pattern or order to it, then there is no way to explain the ordering of that matter without adding a spiritual element, a transcendent spiritual force that conditions the matter from without, from outside the system of relations in the matter. Lots of different words for this, god, spirit, law etc. If the chaos of matter is pacified then one cannot account for novelty within the same system, also because of the spiritual element. These materialists also believe that "modern science" has moved toward understanding nature as machines or mechanistic which also eliminates freedom of the individual and ultimately difference, unless we say that humans are a special case that are unique in their creation. So instead of using either of these two approaches to matter and materialism, there is nonlinear dynamics or dynamic systems theory. 

Nonlinear dynamics is a non-mechanistic materialism that talks about complex material systems AND allows someone to take order and novelty into account. As I understand it, it's a way of studying a system of relations that produces a thing always through a series of internal relations. For example, the fertilization of an egg and the resultant baby/animal/thing that is produced. It accounts for the production of the baby as a series of differential relations that occur inside the egg to produce the baby. How matter and energy work together to produce a thing. Manuel Delanda calls this process morphogenesis. It is obviously wicked complicated and I don't understand it as much as I'd like. In his book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Delanda says:

Deleuze rejects several of the entities taken for granted in ordinary forms of realism. To take the most obvious example, in some realist approaches the world is thought to be composed of fully formed objects whose identity is guaranteed by their possession of an essence, a core set of properties that defines what the objects are. Deleuze is not a realist about essences, or any other transcendent entity, so in his philosophy something else is needed to explain what gives objects their identity and what preserves their identity through time. Briefly, this something else is dynamical processes. Some of these processes are material and energetic, some are not, but even the latter remains immanent to the world of matter and energy. (Delanda 3)

This is all really just stage-setting I think. I don't want to get into the particularities of dynamic systems theory (DST) yet because none of the terms Deleuze uses in D&R, like multiplicity, singularity, space, etc. have been introduced yet. So I think that the best way to suss out the important points of DST is to tackle them as Deleuze reveals his concepts that correspond in some manner to those of DST. But I do think it is important to introduce this stuff because so much of my understanding of D&R is filtered through DST. When I talk about concepts like difference or repetition or whatever I find that I have the tendency to get lost in the abstract. Deleuze takes great care to always ground his stuff in actual processes and draws upon differential geometry and math and science in very real ways, to talk about real things, which grounds his philosophy in actuality rather than abstraction. This helps me to then use his philosophy to talk about actual things/events/people rather than conceptual ideas. 

Hope this is all making sense. It's been a  while. If you want to check out other resources for some of this stuff I suggest Delanda's book, or googling state space, nonlinear dynamics, or differential geometry. But man, getting through even the wikipedia pages for those things was so difficult for me that I had to step away and just use my notes from class. Another day.

[mantlea-blog-blog]

Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) is a theory of motor development that can be applied to the management of children with Cerebral Palsy (CP; Darrah & Bartlett, 1995). It is especially useful in the understanding of how movement develops and changes (Smith & Thelen, 1993), and can provide insight into a child's readiness to acquire new motor abilities. This theory proposes that movement is produced from the interaction of multiple sub-systems within the person, task and environment (Thelen, 1989).

Sauve, K., & Bartlett, D. (2010). Dynamic systems theory: A framework for exploring readiness to change in children with Cerebral Palsy. Retrieved from http://www.canchild.ca/en/canchildresources/dynamic_systems_theory.asp