Transmissivity of Measure and Value in Human Systems

Abstract

If competent human intervention is about functional appreciation of change as a mo-tion of matter, it must begin with measure and quantify. This old challenge, recast into the 21st century social, acquires a novel technical as well as moral methodologi-cal dimension. For today’s life is characterised by many interacting ‘levels of being’, of disparate, contingent complexity, geo-political and communicational, genetic and viroid etc., often operating away from equilibrium, each with its input-output vari-ables and limits of applicability. Its action space is fragmented and manipulated by the victorious neo-liberal division of labour increasingly traumatised by the range of capabilities of the high tech tools vastly exceeding those of the human body and mind. The competence then depends chiefly on the ability to project one such set of param-eters on another without losing the transmissivity of projected content and its limits. It will be argued that this challenge calls for a fresh research and development agenda of mapping such transmissions across the relevant domain boundaries, and for foster-ing a class of facilitators fit and willing to legitimate this process by methodological procedures rising to the requirements of dynamic ontology of quasi-objects underly-ing the functioning of human systems and of human expression and communication at large. What is at stake is a shift in attitude, chiefly about the way of seeing and connecting things in terms of quantitative, accreditable relations between empirical parameters and their limits. Its ultimate aim is to provide generic guidelines for de-veloping competent citizenship in which the ultimate measure of value is personal and social independence for all; only then a credible and sustainable process of reforms can come into being and gradually return emergent knowledge to the service of humanity.