Task Layer Multiplicity and Community Level Heath
P. Fraundorf
Physics & Astronomy/Center for Nanoscience, University of Missouri - StL in St. Louis MO 63121
(and adjunct in Physics at Washington U., St. Louis MO 63110) USA
Research question: How about tracking the extent to which organisms manage to work on relationships that look inward & outward from the boundaries of skin, family & culture, i.e. in human terms to spend time on self, friends, family, hierarchy, culture & profession? Some organisms, like tulips and gophers, do not naturally focus on all six.
A long-emergent societal goal has been to empower humans for discretionary participation in all of these areas. Consideration of all layers at once suggests that this may incidentally nurture informed task-layer diversity, since both specialists and generalists of all sorts might improve society's chances to successfully adapt.
This may sound trivial, until one realizes that policies which focus on a single layer of organization sometimes do great damage to other layers in the process of implementation. Moreover, integrative measures of community-health may be key to closed-loop balancing of strategy on important cross-disciplinary issues in the days ahead.
The research question above, and the subpages below, are from a letter of intent assembled in context of this request for proposals on 15 Oct 2015. Even though this is an "empirical" (i.e. data-gathering) project-proposal we are exploring the possibility of using these ideas to help bring theoretical collaborators (e.g. interested in modeling the bloom & decline of layered-complexity from astrophysical, biological, complex-system, and social-science perspectives) on board with the long-term task layer-multiplicity project, discussed elsewhere e.g. on this site.
Now in 2017, we've begun to adapt that more "physically-inspired" order-parameter paper [1], which had been archived but not submitted for peer review, to a more cross-disciplinary audience with a specific focus on community well-being [2]. This attempt was submitted for peer-review to Journal of Theoretical Biology, whose editors requested that we transfer it to Elsevier's cross-disciplinary journal Heliyon.
Given feedback from some helpful reviews there, we've added a less-technical introduction and are currently seeking feedback from across disciplines before we submit a revision. In that context, suggestions invited!
The developing paper abstract now reads:
Layer multiplicity as a measure of community-level health
Abstract: The insights of many disciplines, and of commonsense, about individual well-being might be strengthened by a shift in focus to community well-being, in a way that respects belief systems as well as the power of each individual. We start with the jargon of complex systems and the possibility that a small number of broken symmetries, marked by the edges of a hierarchical series of physical subsystem-types, may underlie the delicate correlation-based complexity of life on our planet's surface. We show that an information-theory inspired model of metazoan attention-focus on correlation-layers, that look in/out from the boundaries of skin, family & culture, predicts that behaviorally-diverse communities may tend toward a characteristic task-layer multiplicity per individual of only e29/20 ≈ 4¼ of the six correlation layers that comprise that community. This behavioral measure of opportunity may: (i) facilitate explorations of task-layer diversity, (ii) go beyond GDP & body count in quantifying the impact of policy-changes & disasters, (iii) partly explain our attraction to unbalanced narratives, and (iv) help manage electronic idea-streams in ways that strengthen community networks. Empirical methods for acquiring task-layer multiplicity data are in their infancy, although for human communities a great deal of potential lies in the analysis of web searches and perhaps other forms of self-reporting.
Footnotes
P. Fraundorf (2013) ``Task layer-multiplicity as a community order parameter", arXiv:1306.5185 [physics.gen-ph] webnotes.