I have the sense that boundaries are so effective as a coordination mechanism that we have come to believe that they are an end in themselves. To me it seems that the over-use of boundaries leads to loneliness that eventually obviates all the goodness of the successful coordination. It’s as if we discovered that cars were a great way to get from place to place, but then we got so used to driving in cars that we just never got out of them, and so kind of lost all the value of being able to get from place to place. It was because the cars were in fact so effective as transportation devices that started to emphasize them so heavily in our lives.
You say “real-world living systems sometimes do funky things like opening up their boundaries” but that’s like saying “real-world humans sometimes do funky things like getting out of their cars”—we shouldn’t begin with the view that boundaries are the default thing and then consider some “extreme cases” where people open up their boundaries.
Some specific cases to consider for a theory of boundaries-as-arising-from-cordination:
A baby grows inside a mother and is born, gradually establishing boundaries. You might say the baby has zero boundaries just prior to conception and full boundaries at age 10? age 15? age 20? How do you make appropriate sense of the coming into existence of boundaries over time?
A human dies, gradually losing agency over years. What is the appropriate way to view the attenuation-to-zero of this person’s boundaries?
During an adult human life, a person finds themselves in situations where it is extremely difficult, for practical reasons, to establish certain boundaries. For example, two people locked in a tiny closet together are unable to establish, perhaps, any boundary around personal space. Perhaps it was a mistake to get locked in there in the first place, but now that they are in there, they need a way to coordinate without being able to establish certain boundaries.
Overall, I would ask “what is an effective set of boundaries given our situation and our goal?” rather than “how can we coordinate on our goals given our situation and our apriori fixed boundaries?”
I have the sense that boundaries are so effective as a coordination mechanism that we have come to believe that they are an end in themselves. To me it seems that the over-use of boundaries leads to loneliness that eventually obviates all the goodness of the successful coordination. It’s as if we discovered that cars were a great way to get from place to place, but then we got so used to driving in cars that we just never got out of them, and so kind of lost all the value of being able to get from place to place. It was because the cars were in fact so effective as transportation devices that started to emphasize them so heavily in our lives.
You say “real-world living systems sometimes do funky things like opening up their boundaries” but that’s like saying “real-world humans sometimes do funky things like getting out of their cars”—we shouldn’t begin with the view that boundaries are the default thing and then consider some “extreme cases” where people open up their boundaries.
Some specific cases to consider for a theory of boundaries-as-arising-from-cordination:
A baby grows inside a mother and is born, gradually establishing boundaries. You might say the baby has zero boundaries just prior to conception and full boundaries at age 10? age 15? age 20? How do you make appropriate sense of the coming into existence of boundaries over time?
A human dies, gradually losing agency over years. What is the appropriate way to view the attenuation-to-zero of this person’s boundaries?
During an adult human life, a person finds themselves in situations where it is extremely difficult, for practical reasons, to establish certain boundaries. For example, two people locked in a tiny closet together are unable to establish, perhaps, any boundary around personal space. Perhaps it was a mistake to get locked in there in the first place, but now that they are in there, they need a way to coordinate without being able to establish certain boundaries.
Overall, I would ask “what is an effective set of boundaries given our situation and our goal?” rather than “how can we coordinate on our goals given our situation and our apriori fixed boundaries?”
Oooo I like this comment, especially the first two examples
also,
Personally I wouldn’t call this a «boundary». I don’t consider boundaries to be things that are “set” or “established”