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Simply asking this, and sharing your answers with others who care if you are happy with them, might (we hope) have a healing effect on you as well as on the communities with which you interact. It might also serve as a way for public officials to monitor community health, and to keep an eye out for trends that they might want to either nurture or slow down.
What are some fun ways to share answers to the following simple question, in terms whose meaning you get to define:
caring for yourself,
reaching out to friends,
caring for your family,
reaching out to your work or home community,
caring for your culture,
reaching out to your profession?
It might also help to ask: On which of these six "attention-slices" would you like to spend more or less time?
This information is also useful in a larger scientific context. From the point of view of any community of multicelled life-forms, center-of-mass task-layer-multiplicity (TLM) in the range from 1 to 6 may serve as an effective measurement of community cohesion. For example a higher value for center-of-mass layer-multiplicity, something like species-diversity beyond the organism level, is a potential survival trait for communities e.g. in the face of environmental stress and/or disaster.
At the same time the smaller "geometric-average" task-layer-multiplicity of individuals (also between 1 and 6) can serve to measure the cross-layer engagement of community-participants. For example, communities able to afford less pro-forma role-specialization (e.g. where each organism chooses their own mix) may have larger individual multiplicities (in the free running case about 4¼) than communities whose resources allow a limited range of choice for some individuals. For instance the individual average might be closer to 3 if gender-specific tasks restrict one's focus to inward-looking (i.e. self, family, culture) versus outward-looking i.e. (friends, hierarchy, profession) sub-system correlation-buffering.
One other important feature of communities may also turn out to be task-layer diversity. Not only are most folks not engaged to the max in all six layers, but a mix of informed differences in the kinds of assignments that each person takes on is probably a good thing. The fact that most of us are not maximally engaged on all levels thus might serve as a scientific basis for a bit of humility, even for folks who excel in the aspects of engagement on which they do focus. By that same token, it serves as a scientific basis to embrace informed diversity of focus among individuals.
Boundaries and correlations: The basic idea is that emergent boundaries may be first recognized by behavioral correlations. Let's look at such correlations as an external observer of metazoan life on earth, with help from public accounts by ethologists like Konrad Lorenz e.g. in his books King Solomon's Ring and On Aggression. The sequence of emergence was:
The Cambrian bloom a half-billion years ago gave rise to a diversity of body-types defined by the metazoan skin, after which territorial extensions of that skin also sometimes developed.
Later a subset of those metazoans began behaving differently toward family members. A new boundary type had emerged, whose identification with molecular-codepool correlations awaited the discovery of DNA.
In association with the emergence of spoken languages in animal communities, yet a third boundary type became manifest whose identification with idea-codepool correlations began to sharpen with invention of phonetic alphabets, moveable type, and eventually digital culture (e.g. youtube and collaboration spaces like this).
Self-concept types for those boundaries:
Self-concept types for those boundaries:
The boundaries mentioned above all emerged without the need for we-memes, that is for replicable idea-codes developed to help maintain these correlations. However among social vertebrates (humans in particular) a set of layered concepts of self have also emerged as important tools for the neurophysiological public-relations module that helps process our reactions and perceptions, sometimes after the fact. The first of these self-concepts which folks individually define involves that of one's personal or physical space i.e. a conceptual extension of one's metazoan skin. The second self-concept type is that associated with one's molecular code-pool or "family", i.e. a conceptual extension of one's metazoan kin. The last self-concept type is that associated with one's idea-pool or "culture", i.e. a conceptual grouping of one's kindred spirits. Thus if you can read this, then you probably get to define three correlation-based physical boundary types that surround your self-awareness. Your definitions, in turn, can help track how you employ your freedom (where it exists) to buffer correlations looking inward and outward from these three boundary types. Correlation buffering:
The boundaries mentioned above all emerged without the need for we-memes, that is for replicable idea-codes developed to help maintain these correlations. However among social vertebrates (humans in particular) a set of layered concepts of self have also emerged as important tools for the neurophysiological public-relations module that helps process our reactions and perceptions, sometimes after the fact. The first of these self-concepts which folks individually define involves that of one's personal or physical space i.e. a conceptual extension of one's metazoan skin. The second self-concept type is that associated with one's molecular code-pool or "family", i.e. a conceptual extension of one's metazoan kin. The last self-concept type is that associated with one's idea-pool or "culture", i.e. a conceptual grouping of one's kindred spirits. Thus if you can read this, then you probably get to define three correlation-based physical boundary types that surround your self-awareness. Your definitions, in turn, can help track how you employ your freedom (where it exists) to buffer correlations looking inward and outward from these three boundary types. Correlation buffering:
Even when folks have the freedom to buffer correlations on all six layers they don't always use it, and that's fine if they are consciously choosing to ignore some aspect of it. In fact, this tendency can contribute toward behavioral diversity in one's community.
Nonetheless conscious awareness of what's being embraced and/or ignored has many advantages to an individual.
First off, it calls their attention to what freedoms they do and don't have as well as to which actions might help with, or hinder (like unwanted addictions), their impact on sub-system correlations in a given layer.
Secondly, multi-layer buffering serves as a hedge against parochialism even in areas on which folks choose to specialize, since it may be healthy if all folks are not expert at all layers but it's probably good if they are aware of the shortcomings as well as strengths of their perspective.
Finally it can be useful as a tool for accountable self-management of one's own freedom to act, by providing a place to:
(i) set up specific (perhaps even quantitative) goals,
(ii) keep a reading file on progress toward them, and
(iii) periodically review and recast them downstream.
This data platform, of course, should be available only to the user and those that user elects to share it with.
Sharing of statistical data on layer-multiplicity in this context, of course, would be a much less invasive proposition since it need say nothing about either specific goals or about user recognition beyond their membership status in the analyzing community.
Do you think Google might be interested in hosting secure space for managing data on freedoms-exercised like this, for folks all across the planet? Individual would get reports that might help manage their own objectives over time, while all of us might gain quantitative insight into the impact of policy-decisions (as well as natural-disaster responses) on community health across the globe.
Related References
Konrad Lorenz (1961) King Solomon's Ring Translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson. Methuen, London. 202 pages. ISBN 0-416-53860-6.
Konrad Lorenz (1974/2002) On Aggression (Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, London) preview, first published in 1963 as Das Sogenannte Böse, Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression (Verlag Dr Borotha-Schoeler, Vienna, Austria), this book also contains some applications of the concept of "behavior-redirection" that might be interesting to re-examine in context of today's experimental and theoretical insights into neuroscience.
Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2004) Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution (U. Chicago Press, IL).
Jared Diamond (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking Books) ISBN 1-586-63863-7.
Joel M. Hektner, Jennifer A. Schmidt, and M. Csikszentmihalyi (2007) Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Quality of Everyday Life (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing) google.
Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson (2008) The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (W.W. Norton: NY.) 522 pp.
P. Fraundorf (2008) "The thermal roots of correlation-based complexity", Complexity 13:3, 16-26.
P. Fraundorf (2008) "A simplex model for layered niche-networks", Complexity 13:6, 29-39.
David Sloan Wilson, Daniel Tumminelli O'Brien, Artura Sesma (2009) "Human prosociality from an evolutionary perspective: variation and correlations at a city-wide scale", Evolution and Human Behavior 30, 190–200.
Robert Kurzban (2010) Why everyone (else) is a hyprocrite: Evolution and the modular mind (Princeton U. Press, Princeton NJ).
Matthew Hurley, Reginald Adams and Daniel Dennett Jr. (2011) Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press, 2011).
David Eagleman (2011) Incognito: The secret lives of the brain (Pantheon, NY) preview.
Dean Buonamano (2011) Brain Bugs: How the brain's flaws shape our lives (W. W. Norton & Co., NY).
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